Here are some surprising ways a few of the big chiefs stay so productive: Drop what you’re doing and sleep ... Fire your assistant ... Be consistent ... Pick up a challenging habit or train for a triathlon ... Give people half the time they request ... Focus on handshakes, not contracts.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey may have found the solution to the interruption-heavy life of a C-suite executive: He themes his days. If he didn’t, he might find it impossible to do his job. Or, rather, jobs.

Willie Walsh, chief of British Airways, revealed that he hadn’t had a vacation in more than five years. Walsh is known for his toughness, but it’s an open question whether anyone can continue to think straight or maintain a sense of perspective without a break from work in so long.

As people grapple with the urge to put things off, economists and psychologists have turned the study of procrastination into a significant field. And what have they discovered? That each of us is divided. If that’s true, simply trying harder to beat procrastination isn’t going to work. Here’s what will:

If you feel as though you’re doing more but getting less done, it may be because you’re still multitasking. Leadership expert Stever Robbins may have put his finger on why: You like to multitask. “Just don’t expect to accomplish very much doing it,” he says. Robbins has developed a system that can help you maintain concentration and do more in less time.

If you can measure it, you can improve it. You can optimize. But how much of your energy are you spending on optimization vs. creation? Seth Godin, a thought leader in marketing and the changing business environment, says, “I worry that a never-ending cycle of optimization can become a crutch, a place to hide when you really should be confronting the endless unknown, not the banal stair step of incremental optimization.”

Stever Robbins, famous for advice on maximizing your creativity and whipping your e-mail into submission, now is integrating time management and innovation into a coherent system for getting things done. From his new guide to working less and accomplishing more:

In this second year of high anxiety, here are three ideas you can use as a leader to gain some altitude so you won’t be bumping along the bottom: 1. Do the numbers. 2. Take a walk on the workers' side. 3. Consult your moral compass.