Materials:
Despite what many products claim, no one product will comprehensively cover all the material you need to do well on Step 1.  There are many products out there, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.  The difficult job of purchasing review products is finding three or four products that together give you a comprehensive, and easily learned review of the material tested on Step 1.  I will review here the strategy I used for study that yielded a score that fell somewhere in the 96th percentile.  As always, study styles differ and, in fact, my study strategy ended a bit different than it started.  This will be a guide, but when studying for boards, nothing is sacred, if something is not working or seems to be too inefficient, by all means change it or dump it.
Buying materials is pretty daunting.  I used First Aid for Step 1 as my guide.  This is a pretty general book that hits high points in every organ system.  They update the material every year, so it reflects what was seen on last year’s test.  Memorizing every page of this book is always high yield.  An alternative that I bought but found less useful is Step Up to USMLE; same idea as First Aid, but I found it harder to use and as a result it became a minor part of my studying.  More detailed review books that you may have bought for your classes such as BRS or Lange are useful to help clarify concepts or to look up little annoying details you just can’t seem to remember.  Just use the ones you have, don’t buy any new ones because you will use them infrequently enough that it will be a waste of money.
Question banks are also a must have for board study.  The NBME are very good at writing questions.  You can not rely on simply being a good test taker to get through this test.  You need to have access to board style questions to get acquainted with the subtleties of these questions.  Kaplan and USMLEworld offer online versions of these.  I can attest to Kaplan’s quality, but from what I have heard USMLEworld is very good as well.
Many other products such as audio tapes, live classes, and flash cards exist.  The pharmcards you have no doubt used for your classes are pretty useless for Step 1.  People have used audio tapes in their car with varying degrees of success.  I used them on areas that I felt especially weak just to get the extra contact time.  Live classes are very expensive and difficult to set up.  The vast majority of students do not use live classes in their review.  Other than that I don’t know a whole lot about them.
The PDA flash cards you find here on www.medicalschoolsecrets.com are very useful to help reinforce concepts and simply drive in all the stuff that is pure memorization.  These cards use the concept of spaced repetition to maximize the amount you are able to memorize in a fixed amount of time.  I used them to fill in gaps in my study.  Good times to use flash cards are when you are in line for coffee, walking to and from your car, or daydreaming because you simply cannot look at your book anymore.  Think of it this way.  Say you stand in line for 5 minutes for coffee, a two minute walk to and from your car, another 5 minutes for lunch, and 15-20 daydreaming every day.  That is almost 35 minutes every day that you could be doing easy, scientifically verified, studying.  Over a four week study schedule, that is a 16 hour studying edge you can have over everyone else.  And that is the difference between a 240 and a 260.
For a more in-depth review of products available see the back of First Aid.

Schedule:
Here I will describe some basic concepts behind setting up a schedule and provide a sample schedule that I used.  First though, it is important to say that Board study is much more about breadth than depth.  When you run out of time on a particular subject, it is always better to move on to the next than to try to learn more details about the old.  Second, allow 4-5 weeks to study; 6 max.  Set your test date and then make your schedule around this.  Prepare to do NOTHING but sleep and study for this time period.  The more extra stuff you do the worse you will do.  A general rule that seems to have panned out is this; if you want to just barley pass, 8 hours per day will do, if you want to do average 10-12 hours per day will do, if you want to do great plan on 14-16 hours per day.
In the 4-6 week period that you have just selected, identify any days that you must have off (a best friend is getting married, not happy hour at a bar you like).  Next you will take one day a week off every week.  This is very important because by the end of the week you are so burnt out that your studying is incredibly low yield.  You need a day off to recharge and get ready for the next six days.  That said, after a day of crappy study the last thing you feel like you need is a day off, you will want to use your day off to catch up.  This is how medical students and cocaine addicts get into trouble.  No matter how much you think you need to study… your day off is your day off, the next day back will be much more productive and you will make up for any lost time.  Take every day that you have set aside and divide it into morning and afternoon sessions about 3-4 hours long.  Allow one hour for lunch, and one hour for dinner.  After dinner will be time to catch up and to do questions.  The Sixth day of the rotation (right before your day off) will be morning of study and the whole afternoon and evening taking a half or full length practice exam.
Since the fad in medical education now days is organ system based, pretty much all books you use will be organ system based, so it is more pain than it is worth to try to organize your study in any other way.  When making your schedule, list out all the organ systems: Cardiovascular, Respiratory, GI, Renal, Endocrine, Neuro, Hepatobiliary, Musculoskeletal.  Next try to group them according to how much information each contains.  For example, CV, Neuro, and Renal were my top three, GI, Endocrine, Musculoskeletal, and Hepatobilliary were my bottom four.  In each group list the systems from weakest to strongest.  Do the organ systems in order from largest weakest to smallest strongest.  Allow more time for weaker and larger organ systems.  Now add the organ systems into the days you have set aside.
Within each organ system you are going to work with the time you have already devoted and further divide it up into discipline; embryology, histology, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, pathology, microbiology.  Look at each discipline and estimate the amount of material and the relative difficulty and assign anywhere from 30min to 4-6 hours for each.  Remember to stay within the time frame you have already set aside for that organ system and don’t compromise the time in the evening for review, catch up, and practice questions.  Tempting as it may be, in the long run it is a bad idea.

Miscellaneous:
If you put the time in (14-16hrs per day) and stick to your schedule, you will get around a 230.  This is the section where the 230s get separated from the 260s.  If you can get a 230, you are smart enough to get a 260, it simply takes very efficient study and determination.  During the day, you will run into times when you feel you cannot memorize another fact, instead of taking a 20 minute break (which, from experience, will not work after a while) read through some clinical vignettes (UCV and Kaplan’s ICV are both good).  When you take a break to grab a coffee or a snack, if it is not your official break time, you should be studying.  Medical School Secrets.com PDA flash cards are great for this; go through a few as you stand in line and as you walk.  Also use these when you just need to sit back and look at the ceiling.  Don’t worry about memorizing them, the SuperMemo program takes care of everything for you.  If you use them everyday, you will recognize more things as you study and you will eventually know them all over the course of 4-6 weeks.  Bottom line; when your brain is hurting and nothing is high yield, Medical School Secrets.com flash cards are high yield.
Practice questions are great when used well, when used incorrectly they are a waste of time.  Any product you buy should have good detailed explanations for every question.  If not, don’t waste your money.  Do questions in groups of fifty, and finish all before you check your answers.  This is how they appear on the real test, and it makes no sense to practice differently than how you will be tested.  As you go mark all the questions that you are not completely sure about.  After the test, go back, read, and take notes on all questions you missed OR were unsure about.  If you don’t do this you are wasting your time.  Spend 1 hour taking the 50 question block, and 2-4 hours reading and taking notes on explanations.  Do this every day and you will notice a gradual and steady improvement in your scores.