I'm used to being productive, ever since I was young.

Priorities are the yearly goals that I'm most interested in achieving, then they become operationalized through weekly goals.

You need to agree with your boss about what you need to get done that week, what are the metrics of success. Sometimes you need more hours, sometimes you need fewer hours.

Routinize the routine. The things that aren't important to you, whether it's breakfast or your commute, try to do them with the least energy possible so that leaves you with more energy for other things.

I am a great believer in the OHIO principle: Only handle it once. When you read an e-mail, decide whether or not to reply to it, and, if you need to reply, do so right then and there. I have found that about 80 percent of all e-mails, whether internal or external, do not require a response.

The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that's really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do.

There are people who literally cannot start a project until the deadline is four hours away, even if it's a big one. And those people have a serious problem. My recommendation is set up mini-deadlines. You might say, 'Okay, here's my deadline after three days for this and there's another deadline for that and then a third deadline.