When it comes to doing a long-term project, most people follow one of two paths: saving the heavy lifting for shortly before the deadline or making an initial big push right out the gate. After years of doing and assigning projects in business and academic settings, I've found a better way. First, let me explain the dangers of the two more-common methods.

The 11th-Hour Approach. When you wait too long to do the bulk of the work on a project, your best ideas percolate beyond the point of effervescence. Allowing a delay between when an idea is freshest and when you give it your most concentrated attention takes the juice out of the creative process. In effect, you're working hardest at a time other than when you're at your creative peak. That mismatch isn't necessarily a recipe for disaster, but it does diminish your potential for top performance, especially with the deadline breathing down your neck.

The 1st-Hour Approach. You're also vulnerable to underachievement if you dive into a project before it has had a chance to stew in your brain. If you find yourself saying "I just want to get this done" and rush to begin, your work will be bland because you haven't given it time to simmer. You may tell yourself that you'll revisit the task later, but your "clear-my-desk" attitude will prevent you from ever really seeing the completed work with fresh eyes. "After all," you'll think, "the meal's already cooked. Why should I cook it again?" The reality is that it hasn't been cooked enough.

The Optimal Approach. Closing the gap between the quality of what you can produce and what you do produce is all about where you place your pressure point. After you officially take on a project, give yourself a brief window during which you're actively thinking about it but haven't yet begun the work in earnest -- that all-important "stew" time. Just as your ideas begin to bubble up and give off their heady aroma, that's your creative sweet spot. It's precisely when you should initiate your highest-intensity activity. If you wait too long, you'll squander your creative moment and have a tough time recapturing it later. Instead, use the jolt of early curiosity to gear you up and carry you through the longest stretch of hard work. You'll put in long hours as if the deadline is approaching, but you're being motivated internally by your own creativity rather than externally by the clock. If you seize the moment in this way, you can finish the heavy lifting for most projects not long after the halfway point.

What do you do with the time that remains? Revise, revise, revise. True "re-vision" -- seeing your work anew -- requires the space to start fresh each time you come back to the task. That means sleeping on your refinement decisions several times, which you can't do when you're right up against a deadline.

Does this approach to long-term projects guarantee top performance? Of course not. There are always project-specific contingencies, including when other people are available to do their parts. But insofar as you have some control over a project's trajectory (let's face it, you often do), you should exercise it so that your creative impulse is in sync with your execution. Starting too soon smothers that impulse; starting too late lets it rot on the vine.

Have you consciously tried to optimize your period of greatest creative potential? If not, what's your secret for top performance on a project?

Skype's new owners — Silver Lake Partners, Marc Andreessen, and company — are getting a company valued at $2.75 billion (according to former owner eBay) with 405 million users. That's $6.79 per registered user, and a little over five times Skype's 2008 revenue of $511 million. Skype grew by 44% in 2008. So did the sale — in which eBay retains a 35% stake in the company — come cheap or dear?

My guess is that the buyers got a good deal because the human voice is our most fundamental communication medium. Global average revenue per user per year (ARPU) used to be in the range of $50-80, so Skype is paying about 1/10th the ARPU for the registered user. So what? Well, given that the phone (including data over the phone) is unquestionably the fastest growing part of the consumer electronics market, and will be so for the foreseeable future, it seems to me the investors are buying a cheap option on the most disruptive, and fastest growing part of the entire telecommunications market. Communications is the killer app of almost every technology — from telegraphy to email.

For many companies operating internationally Skype is a no-brainer, with calls costing a fraction of the cell phone, local PTT, or hotel rates. It also obviates the need for country-specific international calling cards. Some countries have blocked Skype, and there are potential security concerns, but these are manageable issues. Over time, I am certain that Skype will continue to grab market share for international calls.

Furthermore, because Skype terminates on phones — and people are accustomed to paying for phone calls, especially international ones — and due to the fact that international phone call pricing is a still a ridiculous patchwork of usually outrageous tariffs, Skype will continue to grow. Not only are Skype's prices lower, they are simpler. They also have a video call service which some companies are starting to use for long distance coordination. (If Google Voice also takes off, it will help develop the market that much faster.) Finally, Skype has designed the software to work well with Asterisk, which is the Linux of the telephony market.

If you think of Skype more abstractly, they are a company with a great peer-to-peer infrastructure, a robust database of people and their communication devices, and a global footprint. In addition to voice, they've got video. They can be, simultaneously, a global multi-media company, a person-to-person communication company, and a file-sharing company. They almost always make money when someone reaches out to the very "end" of the network by connecting to a cell phone. That audience, access and growth is worth at least $6.79 per user. From this point of view, perhaps Facebook — which has still to find its killer app for revenue — should have bought them. If Facebook were like Gillette — which markets razors but collects revenue on the blades that go with them — the giant "social razor" that Facebook has built might be monetized by the "blade" of phone revenue.

Facebook, with its 400 million-plus members, could have created a real-time voice component allowing for the connection of people by voice as well as by "face." There have been many people who have noted that the phone idea of "one person calling another" is an anachronism. But in fact, the party line — which was shared by a number of households — was present long before the single-person-to-single-person phone call. As Diamond Fellow David Reed has pointed out in the Harvard Business Review before, networks that allow people to self-organize provide all the power of the point-to-point network, and lots of new options. Facebook allows all the facility of email, and a lot more. It could have done the same for voice, and become one of the world's biggest phone companies overnight.

If you market your business online, there is a good chance you may be using Google. But are you taking advantage of the Google Content Network? According to Google, customers spend 95% of their time browsing sites beyond search engines, so this is probably a good idea.

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