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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

Most people get overwhelmed by the insignificant decisions of their lives. I’m urging people to minimize the time spent on these when they’re not critical to their most important goals.

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

The way you delegate is that first you have to hire people that you really have confidence in. You won’t truly let those people feel a sense of autonomy if you don’t have confidence in them.

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.

If employees need to stay late in order to curry favor with the boss, what motivation do they have to get work done during normal business hours? After all, they can put in the requisite ‘face time’ whether they are surfing the Internet or analyzing customer data.