Sadly, our bosses were not on board for adopting Donald Trump's work schedule
Early this morning, around the time when Donald Trump reaches for his phone but long before he actually gets up to do some work, we read a story in Axois detailing the 45th President of the United States of America’s daily work schedule. Turns out he does even less with his time than was previously believed, and spends much of his ever-shortening workdays (he used to begin his days with breakfast meetings, but apparently they didn’t agree with his child-emperor temperament) watching TV, tweeting, and making phone calls, which is referred to on the White House schedule as “executive time.” This past Thursday, for example, the only item on Trump’s schedule was an hour of what’s vaguely referred to as “policy time,” followed by “executive time,” lunch, and more “executive time.” Compared to that, his Tuesday, which consisted of three meetings sandwiched between “executive time” sessions and lasted for five hours and 15 minutes, was downright grueling.
Inspired by Trump’s dual strategies of alternating meetings with free periods and half-assing a bunch of things at once in order to create the illusion of busyness, we then clicked around on social media for a while, answered a couple of emails, found the most orange Trump picture we could find, and showed it to all our coworkers before getting back to the story. Turns out it is pretty easy to spend an entire day that way.
Sadly, however, our bosses at The A.V. Club were not on board to adapt our work schedule permanently to Trump’s, which would mean beginning at 11 a.m. and ending by 6 p.m. at the latest with an hour-long lunch and multiple breaks incorporated into the workday. The suggestion that maybe nothing worth talking about happens before noon anyway was summarily shut down, while the suggestion of establishing “writer time” during which we would do very important, but not necessarily productive, things upon which we absolutely could not elaborate under any circumstances was met with, “sounds like a good time to have some very important meetings with HR.” How are we supposed to prove what, like, geniuses we are when we’re alert and productive for more than a couple hours a day?
Anyway, yesterday Trump also postponed his proposed “fake news awards” from today to Wednesday, reportedly because there’s been so much interest from late-night hosts who are definitely not just making fun of him. But think about it: His DVR must be overflowing after being away for a couple of weeks at Mar-A-Lago. Or, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it, “The President is one of the hardest workers I’ve ever seen and puts in long hours and long days nearly every day of the week all year long. It has been noted by reporters many times that they wish he would slow down because they sometimes have trouble keeping up with him.”