I thought most people try to take atleast a month off to do board review. Is this not possible for you 09ers?
I'd say on average people in my class took 2-3 weeks off. I had a week and 3 of those days we had Kaplan Review, but it worked for me.
When you're about to take boards everyone asks you, "Are you ready?"
The answer is and always will be, "No." You can never be fully ready for boards and you will never know everything. Trying to know everything will only leave you feeling stressed out beyond belief. The most important/productive studying you will do will likely occur from January (or whenever you start studying) until about 3 weeks before you take boards. From then in, I feel you should just be reviewing stuff you have already covered. If you're trying to learn new stuff those last 2-3 weeks, you're way behind the 8 ball.
My advice: Pick a date when you're gonna take boards and prepare with that date in mind. Once you know when you're gonna take boards, plan your studying accordingly.
I selected the end of May as my time to take boards, I started studying in January from about 6AM until classes at 8PM and then in the evening when I was done with class studying. By the time the last week finally came, I was so sick of studying and burned out from it, I didn't get much productive studying done. I had already covered everything I wanted to cover and was only reviewing so it didn't hurt me that much.
When I first told classmates back in january that I was taking boards the end of May, many thought I was nuts to take it so early. By the time my day to take it came, most told me they were jealous of me for getting it done so soon and that they were burned out from studying and just wanted to take it and be done.
A buddy of mine didn't take his boards until August, by mid July he was sick of studying and could only handle studying 2-3 hours a day because he was so sick of it. After he took his boards, he said he felt like he would have done better had he taken it in May or June than he did taking it in August.
Just my advice and experiences.