What’s their schedule like?
We’ve established that they are ramping up their time of working, but what are they actually doing? The answer: they are doing what many people believe a president should be doing, such as serving as the country’s commander-in-chief, and less time on political party issues.
As the paper by Sullivan says, which is being prepared for publication and shared with Live Science, approximately 35 percent of the president’s working hours were assigned to chores unique to the office, such as commander-in-chief, or the head of the armed forces, as authorized by the U.S. Constitution and acting as the United States’ chief diplomat.
Another 31% of the president’s working hours were spent on legislative responsibilities, for example, meeting with congressional leaders and signing bills into law, as well as managing the White House. This includes directing the work of his nominated chief of staff and other high-level subordinates.
Economic management accounted for only about 1.4 percent of daily activities on average, as Sullivan stated, probably because the responsibility was usually transferred to experts in the industry.
There is 9% of their time that is usually spent on chores linked to his political party’s leadership and communications. The remaining rest of the president’s day is assigned to travel and personal time.
If you want to see a specific president’s schedule, you can access it!
Anyone with internet access who is curious about how presidents have spent any given day over the past century can simply access it. They have kept a book now known as a “daily diary” since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency in 1933.
Many of these detailed diaries can be found online at various presidential libraries, as John Woolley, co-director of The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) says. In addition to that, UCSB has in plan to become a comprehensive online archive for presidential documents that are public.
The diary is a book filled up with details about what every president did in a day, the complete opposite of what is being made public through press releases.
In conformity with the White House Historical Association, modern presidents’ diaries are now collected by National Archives employees, as permitted by the Presidential Records Act of 1978. They have details from sources such as the president’s daily itinerary, Secret Service logs, and even notes from White House staff.
