In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.

I didn't even start college until I was 21.

I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I'm up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.

I spend a lot of my time trying to help leaders build cultures of productive givers.

For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.