Desks and people collaborating throughout the day. Macon Phillip s, former Director of Digital Strategy: Close your eyes and imagine the physical space at the campaign-one giant room. I might tell you something you don’t want me to say when you walk in, but the door is always open to come in and say something. My rule as chief of staff was the door is always open.
Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff: Twice a day I would walk the halls and go put my head in somebody’s office. I created a little bit of room in the morning, just after the meetings, to try to account for things that may have happened overnight. It has this cascading effect if you’re not careful. The train can be delayed and then they start canceling. But then I quickly realized, if you do have a crisis, it blows up your whole day. At the beginning, I used to book myself very tightly during the day. My meetings were typically in 20-minute increments starting at 8 o’clock and going until 7:30 at night. Sutphen: The sheer magnitude of the issue set means that you never have enough time in the day. Allow some room in your schedule so you can deal with a crisis.
If you think about it, if you’re the President and you start getting stuff in a gazillion different formats, you can’t make head nor tail of it. Lisa Brown, former Staff Secretary: We sent senior staff clear templates for how a memo to the President should be written, how a briefing memo for an event that the President’s going to be doing the next day should be written. Because I very rarely was able to scratch things off of the to-do list when I did do the to-do list, I found it actually a very dissatisfying exercise. Mona Sutphen, former Deputy Chief of Staff: I used to be a big fan of to-do lists, but the to-do list actually took too much time. You spend the rest of the day trying to unwind all the decisions that were made. Much of decision making is done by email chain, and if you miss the beginning of the chain, it could go off in a horrible direction pretty quick. Don’t miss the beginning of email chains.ĭan Pfeiffer, former Senior Adviser to the President : One of the most important things you will do is keep your eye on your BlackBerry at all times.From staying on top of email and skipping to-do lists, here are some suggestions from current and former staffers at President Barack Obama’s White House. But White House aides learn to cope, and they have some tips that could help others. The technology isn’t as easy to use as your last job-no Slack or Google Chat, for example.
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