Honestly? Refuse. In my experience, there are very few situations where crunch time affects the bottom line. There are some, to be sure, but chances are slim that you have stumbled upon it. More likely, someone higher up got impatient and is driving this. I have worked many a Saturday nights until 3-4 am to try to launch a site on Monday, just to learn that there was going to be a month long delay because someone els…
Its also helpful to remember that you need to "manage up" and push back on clients or managers if you don't think deadlines are feasible given your resources.
I find it easiest to make sure people imposing deadlines understand that anything is possible given enough time and if they really need to have something done they will need narrow the scope.
IE
If someone says:
"We need X by Friday"
If its not possible, I always say:
"hats not really possible, but what I can give you is X-2 by Friday and we could build into full X in about 3 weeks assuming nothing comes up."
Then if some new project comes up I always tell the person how it is going to change "X".
ie:
If someone says:
"There is a big problem with Y we need fixed"
I say, "Ok we can fix that but its going to push back X 8 weeks".
I hope that makes sense.