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.

It's 5 P.M. at the office. Working fast, you've finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don't come off as a slacker. It's an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace.

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've seen people spend days, if not months, researching and gathering data, but only at the end did they finally figure out what they were really looking for; then they have to redo a lot of stuff. If after a day or so you force yourself to put together your tentative conclusions, then you'll have guidance for the rest of your research.

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.

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?

You have various institutions like law firms and accounting firms which bill by the hour. I'm really against that. You have an incentive to go slowly, be there as long as possible, to over-research things and over-staff.