21st-century
presidents like Barack Obama face an especially daunting task. How can anyone
get things done with 300 million bosses, a 24-hour news cycle of critics, and a
to-do list that is often life or death? Oh, and all in a city whose name is
synonymous with bureaucracy?
Thanks
to the fantastic journalism of Michael Lewis ofVanity Fair, Ryan Lizza of The
New Yorker, and others, we were able to assemble a detailed portrait of how a
modern-day president like Barack Obama works.
Here are some particularly useful productivity tips
from our current commander-in-chief.
1.
Get a head start on your day the night before.
“In a funny way,” writes Michael Lewis,
“the president’s day actually starts the night before. When he awakens at
seven, he already has a jump on things.”
After his family
retires to bed, Obama often stays up working on odds and ends left over from
the day. Chief among his nightly responsibilities is leafing through the binder
of documents that his staff has asked him to review.
For example, after
he won the Nobel Peace Prize, his staff submitted several acceptance speeches
that Obama deemed unusable. Instead of cramming the speechwriting process into
tiny windows throughout the next day, the president utilized his night to get a
head start. First, he copied the staff-written speech by hand to “organize his
thoughts” and then he used the exercise to write his own speech, an approach would
have been impossible during his traditional day.
I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m
eating or wearing because I have too many other decisions to make.
2.
Limit decision fatigue.
White House
operations grow increasingly complex with every administration. Harry Truman
had 12 “assistants to the president.” Now there are more than 100 people who
have a similar title. As a result, President Obama tries to limit
his information intake, including when he gets dressed in the morning.
“I don’t want to
make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing,” he told Michael Lewis.
“Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
The practice
doesn’t only apply to his wardrobe. In early 2012, The New Yorker‘s
Ryan Lizza obtained hundreds of pages of White
House memos that offered an intimate look into the
inner-workings of Obama’s team. Among the story’s nuggets: the president
prefers to have “decision” memos delivered to him with three checkboxes at the
bottom that read: agree, disagree, or “let’s discuss.”
3.
Shut out your critics.
Richard Nixon
famously kept a “list of enemies,” but a
president in today’s polarized 24-hour news cycle doesn’t have that luxury.
Profiles of the president repeatedly mention his preference for ESPN over cable
news.
“One cardinal rule
of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any
talking heads or any politics. We watch SportsCenter and argue
about that,” Obama told The New York Times.
Obama says he likes
to filter the news as much as possible, but recognizes that no one can live in
a bubble. “One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that
there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama,” he told Michael
Lewis. “That’s not you.”
The rest of my time will be more productive if you
give me my workout time.
4.
Exercise.
President Obama
starts every day with 45 minutes of weights or cardio in his personal
gym. “His logic was always, ‘The rest of my time will be more productive
if you give me my workout time,’” Obama’s former campaign manager told WebMD.
Occasionally, he
also holds a regular basketball game with a handful of Washington friends, each
with serious basketball experience. (Obama plays in red-white-and-blue Under
Armor high-tops with the number “44″ on them.)
“You have to
exercise or at some point you’ll just break down,” Obama told Michael Lewis.
5.
Your personal time is sacred.
The president has
three moments in his schedule that are unquestionably his: the morning workout,
his dinner with his daughters, and the nighttime after his family falls asleep.
Each block of time serves a different role for Obama: the gym keeps his body in
good health, the late night helps him catch up on work, and the dinner is
especially sacred time, with the added benefit of giving the president a bit of
perspective outside his hectic workday.
“[His children are]
not really that interested in his day, because they’re kids,” Senior Advisor
Valeria Jarrett told Vanity Fair.
“They want him to focus on their day.”
Although his presidency is barely a week old, some of Mr.
Obama’s work habits are already becoming clear. He shows up at the Oval Office
shortly before 9 in the morning, roughly two hours later than his early-to-bed,
early-to-rise predecessor. Mr. Obama likes to have his workout — weights and
cardio — first thing in the morning, at 6:45. (Mr. Bush slipped away to
exercise midday.)
He reads several papers, eats breakfast with his family and
helps pack his daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, off to school before making
the 30-second commute downstairs — a definite perk for a man trying to balance
work and family life. He eats dinner with his family, then often returns to
work; aides have seen him in the Oval Office as late as 10 p.m., reading
briefing papers for the next day.
“Even as he is sober about these challenges, I have never seen
him happier,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The chance to be under the same roof with his
kids, essentially to live over the store, to be able to see them whenever he
wants, to wake up with them, have breakfast and dinner with them — that has
made him a very happy man.”
No comments:
Post a Comment