Mandatory auditor rotation is designed to address a potential conflict of interest between a public company and its auditor. Because an auditor is hired and paid by the public company it audits, the auditor's desire to maintain a good relationship with its client could conflict with its duty to rigorously question the client's financial statements.

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.

Wall Street is at best ambivalent. The size of the accounts is nothing big. How many Wall Street firms do you know that are running after people with $5,000 accounts?

We can't count on the Fed to inject this level of liquidity that we saw last year.

If you want an active schedule, you have to husband your time so you can act on the things that are important.

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 night before, go over your schedule and see what you're going to do and what the purpose of what you're doing is. I advocate having a two-column schedule. On the left, put down all your appointments and phone calls. On the right, put down what the purpose is.