October 27, 2019 • 21 mins
When he was president, Theodore Roosevelt could fit eight meetings in an hour—that’s 7.5 minutes for each one. By the time he entered office, Roosevelt had had a fair bit of experience racing against time and coming out ahead: From studying under tutors to attending Harvard to campaigning for William McKinley, TR was a master at making every minute productive. We might not all have TR-level time management skills, but this episode will inspire you to try.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and
Mental Floss. It's a chilly day in February seventy seven
and Theodore Roosevelt, a freshman at Harvard, is busy, very
very busy. He wakes up at seven thirty and breakfasts
(00:23):
on hot biscuits, toast chops or beefsteak, and buckwheat cakes.
After breakfast, he reviews notes from his classes he's taking
classical literature, composition and translation in Greek, Latin and German,
Trigonometry and Geometry, Physics and Chemistry. At ten am, he
eagerly digs into his mail, reviewing the day's letters, perhaps
dashing off a few rapid fire replies. From eleven to
(00:46):
twelve he attends Latin recitation, after which he heads to
the gym to train for an upcoming boxing match in
the lightweight to vision at Harvard. Next lunch, where there
is a free fight that sends a fellow student under
the table, prompting threats of expulse from a Mrs Morgan.
After lunch, there is more studying and more recitation until
late into the afternoon. In the evening, he dines with
(01:08):
a Mr. And Mrs Tudor, writing later that he has
a very pleasant, homelike time. Back in his room, he
dedicates one more hour to his studies, and finally, at
half past ten, he pulls the rocking chair next to
the fire to read. TR is laser focused when it
comes to his reading. In fact, he is so immersed
that the world around him falls away, like it's not
(01:28):
even there. It's maybe, just maybe the one time where
for TR time stands still. One day in the future,
he'll be so engrossed in a book that he will
place his feet perilously close to the flames of a fire.
His boots will ignite, and he won't even notice. From
(01:49):
mental flaws and I heart radio. This is History Versus,
a podcast about how your favorite historical figures faced off
against their greatest foes. I'm your host, Aaron McCarthy, and
this week's episode is two Our versus Time. Roosevelt once declared,
I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life
as any nine other men I know. And it's true.
(02:10):
It's hard to think of another person who accomplished as
much as tr did, even though he was working with
twenty four hours in the day, just like the rest
of us. This is the crazy thing is the busiest
job you can imagine is being the President of the
United States, and even in that job, he felt like
he had too much downtime. That's Cal Newport, author of
the book's Digital Minimalism Choosing a focused life in a
(02:33):
noisy world and Deep work Rules for a focused success
in a distracted world. He first read about TR's featsa
productivity and historian Edmund Morris's book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was homeschooled for most of his life because he
was too weak to go to regular school, but he
thrived under the strict schedules set by the Dresden family
he lived with in Germany for five months in eighteen
(02:55):
seventy three. It's perhaps this time in Germany that formed
TR's lifelong obsession with the schedule. Each day, he would
get up at six thirty, eat breakfast until seven thirty,
then study until twelve thirty. Then he'd have lunch, study
until three, and enjoy free time until tea at seven.
After that it was studying until ten, then bed. He
(03:16):
wrote to his father, the it is harder than I
have ever studied before in my life, but I like
it for I really feel that I am making considerable progress.
When he had to take some time off after an
asthma attack, he insisted that his tutors were extra hard
to make up for what he had missed. When he
was fifteen, the Roosevelts returned to the States and tr
took up with another tutor, this time with an ambitious
(03:38):
goal get into Harvard in the fall of eighteen seventy six,
which meant passing the entrance exams in the summer. Roosevelt
had a year and a half to cram and he
studied six to eight hours every day. His tutor, Arthur Cutler,
later wrote, the young man never seemed to know what
idleness was. According to author David McCullough, in that time,
Roosevelt accomplished when normally took three years, and he passed
(04:01):
his preliminary Harvard entrance exams in July. Tierre kept just
as busy while he was at Harvard, where he lived
in a boarding house off campus because the dorms were
considered not ideal for his asthma. He joined a number
of clubs. He wrote in his diary that he was
librarian of the Porsilian, secretary of the Pudding, treasurer of
the Okay, vice President and the Natural History Society, President
(04:22):
of the a d Q, and editor of The Advocate.
He was also a member of the glee club. Although
he didn't sing, he taught Sunday school. He took dance class,
but avoided going to the theater because I don't care
for it and it might hurt my eyes. He read
incessantly at a rate of two to three pages a minute.
He boxed and wrestled and hiked. He courted the ladies
(04:42):
and had an active social life. He studied as much
as thirty six hours a week, and in between that
he found time to write two works on ornithology and
begin a book that would later be placed on every
Navy ship the Naval War of eighteen twelve. In the
words of one classmate, Tier was four are at it.
This is someone who was taking issues of productivity to
(05:04):
new levels. According to Marris, here got through such huge
amounts of work due to iron self discipline that have
become a habit. He spent just a quarter of the
day to his desk, but he concentrated so hard and
read so rapidly that he could take more time off
than most other students. But even his time off was
not that RESTful. It was packed with activity. Newport was
(05:25):
so inspired by Morris's description of TRS productivity that he
featured Roosevelt in Deep Work. There's really two factors to
his productivity, you know. One is this idea which I've
I've written about more recently, including in digital minimalism, which
is his belief that action is better than inaction. And
and that's like an interesting idea. I mean a lot
of people, especially today, in a world of easy distraction,
(05:47):
think what they really need is this time when they
have nothing to do, they can just sit there and
watch Netflix while swiping on their phone and just be
bathed and pathed at distraction. They need death to recharge
their they're exhausted. But the t R from this other
school of thought, which says you're almost always better off
from a perspective, recharge your satisfaction doing things, quality things,
(06:10):
hard things all the time. You could be doing hard
things or sleep, And that's it. Throughout late nineteenth century
early twentieth century thinkers, this is a common idea that
action all the times, this quality leaves you better off
than trying to alternate between sort of pure passive for
rest and actions. So I like that. But the other
element is that he really believed in this formula that
(06:30):
I've been writing about for years, which is what you
produce is a function of the time you spend, times
your intensity of focus. And so trs Hack was, let
me take the intensity of focus piece of that equation
and really pump it up as high as possible. If
I can do that, then I can really minimize the
time spent piece and get a lot of things accomplished.
(06:52):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
Marris wrote that Roosevelt plotted every day with the methodism
of a Wesleyan minister, and there's no better example of
that than a schedule of one of his days from
the campaign trail in nine. While incumbent presidential candidate William
McKinley largely stayed away from the campaign trail, vice presidential
(07:15):
candidate Roosevelt was criss crossing the country. The schedule itself
is a testament in his boundless energy, but so are
the statistics of that campaign season. According to Marris, Roosevelt
by November had made six hundred and seventy three speeches
in five hundred and sixty seven towns in twenty four states.
He had traveled twenty one thousand, two hundred and nine
miles and spoken an average of twenty thousand words a
(07:37):
day to three million people. One day on the campaign trail,
his schedule went like this. Seven am breakfast, seven thirty
am speech, eight am reading historical work, nine am a speech,
ten am dictating letters, eleven am discussing Montana mines, eleven
thirty am a speech, twelve pm reading an ornithological work,
twile thirty pm speech, one pm, lunch, one thirty pm
(08:00):
speech to thirty pm reading Scottish novelists or Walter Scott.
Three pm answering telegrams, pm a speech, four pm meaning
the press for thirty pm reading, five pm, a speech,
six pm reading, seven pm supper, eight to ten pm speaking,
eleven pm reading alone in his train car, twelve am
to bed. It's enough to make you want to take
(08:25):
a nap. He had a long history of basically having
these really regimented days. Is that something that you think
contributed to his ability to get a lot done? I
think it absolutely did. A lot of people, especially today,
when they're thinking about their personal productivity, they think in
terms of tasks. You know, what do I want to
get done today? Where's my to do list? Maybe I'm
(08:46):
going to do the most important task of the day.
System where I choose one thing I really want to
get done. But something I consistently discover is that high
achievers are often echoing the Roosevelt approach, which is I
want to actually all keep my attention, which means we
look at a particular day. You're not making a task list,
You're blocking off your hours. What am I doing during
(09:06):
this half hour? What am I doing during these three hours?
You have so much attention to given a day, you're
trying to find the optimal allocations. They also think about
this on higher scales. What am I doing this week? Oh,
Wednesday is the day that I'm gonna have a lot
of downtime in the morning, So that's why I'm going
to really get after this project. That's the idea of
thinking about I have, whatever it is, twelve hours of
attention to allocate in a day. Some of those hours
(09:27):
are going to be higher intensity than others depending on
where they fall. How do I get the biggest return
on that attention. That's an incredibly powerful productivity hack. It's
one that I've been preaching, and I was influence in
that in particular by that approach of of TR. We
know he was even doing that with his leisure, which
I find interesting when he's at Oyster Bay, when he
(09:47):
say his house on the Long Island Sound, you have
pretty structured approaches to I'm gonna go rowing, you know,
I'm gonna roll across the sound, that we're gonna play
these games with the cousins, and we're going to read
or whatever. I mean. Even in his leisure he was
allocating his attention as well. So how does tr compared
to other highly productive or successful people in history. So yes,
(10:09):
that as we talked about before, that manic energy, that
that need to always be doing things, that sort of
distrust of passive relaxation, that's pretty common. I mean, you
see that a lot in let's say, in the business
world and high achievers. That's certainly a definitive trade of
let's say like Elon Musk or Bill Gates for example.
These are people who have this restless this restless drive.
(10:30):
I got to do something, I do something else. I
don't trust passive time, I don't trust recharging. I mean
often to the detriment of their health. That type of
thing is common once you get to a certain level
of productivity, like you're running to you two companies at
the same time, where you're running the country at the
same time that you're writing books, and that's how they
get there. You can't get there without being highly intentional
(10:52):
about your time. Roosevelt's level of activity didn't let up
when he was in the White House. This might be
best exemplified by a project created by archive as Chloe Elder,
who in the summer of was between master's degrees and
doing a remote internship at Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson
State University in North Dakota. Every day she'd clock in
and go through material piece by piece, adding metadata. A
(11:14):
lot of the documents Elder was catalog and where letters
written during Roosevelt's presidency. There's something about being popped down
right in the middle of sone's correspondence. It's immediate, it's
often very intimate. As she was working, Elder began to
notice a pattern. I kept saying this one sort of
standard reply from tr secretary, and it would be something
(11:40):
along the lines of thank you very much for your
letter or your invitation, but President Roosevelt is far too
busy to respond personally, or far too busy to attend
the event or make a speech or read your story
that you've submitted to him. And I just wanted to see, well,
how how busy was he? So she decided to create
(12:03):
a calendar, something that would allow her to visualize just
what a week in the life of President Roosevelt looked like.
She began searching through the digitized archives at the Center,
as well as his desk diaries, which he kept every day. Eventually,
she's zeroed in a week where Roosevelt was sitting for
a portrait by John Singer. Sergeant tr would only pose
for half an hour day after lunch, and it was
(12:25):
apparently very hard to get him to sit still and
not be rushing off somewhere else classic TR. After gathering
all the data and crunching the numbers, a picture began
to emerge, and that picture was action packed. According to
the calendar Elder created, sometimes Tr would hold up to
eight meetings in an hour, meaning that if they were
all equal in length, they would have been a mirror
(12:47):
seven and a half minutes each. But even for Tr,
life doesn't neatly fit into such tidy chunks. Some of
the meetings do look like they're really quick. It says
to pay respects, so that sounds like a brief sort
of introduction. But then there's other meetings, and you could
maybe guess what was going on if you also look
(13:07):
at what was happening politically at the time, or looking
at his letters. But a lot of it is still
a bit of a mystery. And on top of his
busy schedule, he was sending letter after letter after letter.
How many letters did he write that week? Oh, I'd
have to cut up one to three, four, five, six, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
(13:37):
I mean a lot of letters that week. I saw
he regularly wrote more letters than he received on any
given day. Really, in his lifetime he wrote over a
hundred fifty thousand letters. I'm not president of the United States,
and I struggled to return an email. Right, this is
probably a good place for a break. We'll be right back.
(14:03):
In addition to his many meetings and his epic commitment
to correspondence, Tira was also reading around a book a
day and making time to be active. Roosevelt played tennis,
though he was never photographed in his tennis whites. He boxed,
and when he couldn't do that anymore, he took up
jiu jitsu. He swam nude in the Potomac, and he
regularly dragged diplomats to Rock Creek Park to take a
(14:25):
brisk walker, maybe scale a cliff. As one such diplomat
later recalled of a John in the park, he made
me struggle through bushes and over rocks for two hours
and a half at an impossible speed, until I was
so done that I could hardly stand. His great delight
is rock climbing, which is my weak point. I disgraced
myself completely, and my arms and shoulders are still stiff
(14:47):
with dragging myself up by roots and ledges. In one place,
I fairly stuck and could not get over the top
till he caught me by the collar and hauled at me.
He did almost all the talking, to my great relief,
for I had no breath to fair. After he left
the White House, Tier's ability to get a lot done
in very little time loomed large. His successor, William Howard
(15:07):
Taft bemoaned, I would give anything in the world if
I had the ability to clear away work as Roosevelt did.
Me too, will me too? I often say that tr
just makes me feel really tired, because it's like how
how you know? So the key factor seems to be
just an internal engine that gives him such a burst
(15:31):
of energy that he has to be doing things throughout
the day. And I've never seen someone focus it more
intensely than he did. But I'm also in I wish
and I had maybe his energy would probably productive. He
didn't have many of the distractions that we have today.
Do we think that he would be as productive if
(15:51):
he had a smartphone, for example, or the internet? I
don't know. I mean, on the one hand, he clearly
had this huge energy and a huge drive to intensely
do things and to produced things. So he might have
been a figure that was just completely dismissive of why
I don't need passive entertainment. I don't need to say
this is not this is not valuable enough. I don't
(16:13):
want to sit here tweeting and I want to write
a book, right, So he might have been completely dismissive
of it. On the other hand, he was highly curious
and and really attracting the new information, and so when
you're talking about the early twentieth century, what could you do?
You could have smart people in the White House. You
could read books like they were they're inherently very focused activities.
We might see a tr that was so entranced by
(16:33):
all these different rabbit holes he could go down that
that that instead of writing the book on naval history,
he would be watching YouTube videos about not tying or
something like that. And if that, if that latter thing
is true, then that begs the question, how many potential trs,
at least in terms of projective output, leadership, and impact,
(16:55):
are we losing because that huge energy and curiosity. I
need to do things and to act, I need to
produce things. I mean, is that being sacked by an
attention to econmy engine? That is more drumming and finally
two that we've ever had before in history. So that's
the pessimistic that's the pessimistic view, is like, we've been
losing potential trs because of it. But I don't know.
(17:17):
I tend to think he he he wants to produce,
he wants to think big thoughts, he wants to produce
interesting things, he wants to make big changes. He probably
would not be a big user of Twitter. That would
be my guess. If you, like me, are wondering where
Roosevelt found the energy to get so much done, one
clue might be in his coffee intake. He was set
(17:38):
to drink up to a gallon of coffee a day,
and according to his son Ted, his mug was less
like a regular coffee mug and more in the nature
of a bathtub. He put up to seven loaves of
sugar in each cup two But according to Elder, that
might not be Roosevelt's ultimate hack. So what do you
think the rest of us can learn about how to
be productive from R's approach to his schedule. Well, I
(18:03):
wouldn't recommend the gall in the coffee a day, but
I think he found what worked for him as far
as being very productive all the time, and he seemed
to thrive in that sort of environment. Tr wasn't used
to sitting still for more than half hour, and his
his mL was to just keep going and keep moving,
(18:23):
and he was steadfast in that that way of doing things,
and I think that really worked for him. Just to
find out what works best and run with it. And
when Newport thinks about how we can all be a
little more like TR. He thinks of a quote from
an interview Steve Martin did with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rosett
asked him, what's your advice to firing entertainers, and Steve
(18:44):
Martin said, well, the advice I give them, which is
never what they want to hear that, the advice I
give them is be so good you can't be ignored.
If you do that, good things will come. But TR
I think really embodied that as well, that he he
didn't just want to do things. He wanted to do
things really well. He always wanted to be so good
you couldn't norm He was always driven to do things
at a really high level of quality, which sounds obvious,
(19:06):
but I think it's it's really different than a lot
of our instincts today, especially in a world of sort
of attention economy media as well as digital communication, where
we also have this hustle culture which is just being busy, right,
do lots of things, email, lots of people, have lots
of coffees, do a lot of things on social media.
Just the kind of in the mix and crushing it
(19:27):
and and hustling and all this and that will somehow
alkamize into some sort of success, and I think tr
represented a counterpoint to that, which is business by itself
means nothing, Hustling by itself means nothing. Things that you produce,
things that you have shipped, that are so good that
it's hard for people to ignore. That's the foundation for
interesting impact. And so I love the way that he
embodied that business for business sake was not a value.
(19:51):
Intensity towards things that really mattered or might have a
real impact was something he cared about, and I think
there's probably a lot to learn from that today. History
(20:12):
Versus is hosted by me Aaron McCarthy. This episode was
written by me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson. The
executive producers are Aaron McCarthy, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited
by Dylan Fagan and Loeberlante. Special thanks to Cal Newport
and Chloe Elder. To learn more about this episode, check
out our website at Mental flass dot com. Slash History
(20:34):
Versus that's Mental Flass dot com. Slash h I S
t O R y VS. History Verses is a production
of I heart Radio and Mental Floss. For more podcasts
(20:55):
from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you send to your favorite shows.
History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and
Mental Floss. It's a chilly day in February seventy seven
and Theodore Roosevelt, a freshman at Harvard, is busy, very
very busy. He wakes up at seven thirty and breakfasts
(00:23):
on hot biscuits, toast chops or beefsteak, and buckwheat cakes.
After breakfast, he reviews notes from his classes he's taking
classical literature, composition and translation in Greek, Latin and German,
Trigonometry and Geometry, Physics and Chemistry. At ten am, he
eagerly digs into his mail, reviewing the day's letters, perhaps
dashing off a few rapid fire replies. From eleven to
(00:46):
twelve he attends Latin recitation, after which he heads to
the gym to train for an upcoming boxing match in
the lightweight to vision at Harvard. Next lunch, where there
is a free fight that sends a fellow student under
the table, prompting threats of expulse from a Mrs Morgan.
After lunch, there is more studying and more recitation until
late into the afternoon. In the evening, he dines with
(01:08):
a Mr. And Mrs Tudor, writing later that he has
a very pleasant, homelike time. Back in his room, he
dedicates one more hour to his studies, and finally, at
half past ten, he pulls the rocking chair next to
the fire to read. TR is laser focused when it
comes to his reading. In fact, he is so immersed
that the world around him falls away, like it's not
(01:28):
even there. It's maybe, just maybe the one time where
for TR time stands still. One day in the future,
he'll be so engrossed in a book that he will
place his feet perilously close to the flames of a fire.
His boots will ignite, and he won't even notice. From
(01:49):
mental flaws and I heart radio. This is History Versus,
a podcast about how your favorite historical figures faced off
against their greatest foes. I'm your host, Aaron McCarthy, and
this week's episode is two Our versus Time. Roosevelt once declared,
I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life
as any nine other men I know. And it's true.
(02:10):
It's hard to think of another person who accomplished as
much as tr did, even though he was working with
twenty four hours in the day, just like the rest
of us. This is the crazy thing is the busiest
job you can imagine is being the President of the
United States, and even in that job, he felt like
he had too much downtime. That's Cal Newport, author of
the book's Digital Minimalism Choosing a focused life in a
(02:33):
noisy world and Deep work Rules for a focused success
in a distracted world. He first read about TR's featsa
productivity and historian Edmund Morris's book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was homeschooled for most of his life because he
was too weak to go to regular school, but he
thrived under the strict schedules set by the Dresden family
he lived with in Germany for five months in eighteen
(02:55):
seventy three. It's perhaps this time in Germany that formed
TR's lifelong obsession with the schedule. Each day, he would
get up at six thirty, eat breakfast until seven thirty,
then study until twelve thirty. Then he'd have lunch, study
until three, and enjoy free time until tea at seven.
After that it was studying until ten, then bed. He
(03:16):
wrote to his father, the it is harder than I
have ever studied before in my life, but I like
it for I really feel that I am making considerable progress.
When he had to take some time off after an
asthma attack, he insisted that his tutors were extra hard
to make up for what he had missed. When he
was fifteen, the Roosevelts returned to the States and tr
took up with another tutor, this time with an ambitious
(03:38):
goal get into Harvard in the fall of eighteen seventy six,
which meant passing the entrance exams in the summer. Roosevelt
had a year and a half to cram and he
studied six to eight hours every day. His tutor, Arthur Cutler,
later wrote, the young man never seemed to know what
idleness was. According to author David McCullough, in that time,
Roosevelt accomplished when normally took three years, and he passed
(04:01):
his preliminary Harvard entrance exams in July. Tierre kept just
as busy while he was at Harvard, where he lived
in a boarding house off campus because the dorms were
considered not ideal for his asthma. He joined a number
of clubs. He wrote in his diary that he was
librarian of the Porsilian, secretary of the Pudding, treasurer of
the Okay, vice President and the Natural History Society, President
(04:22):
of the a d Q, and editor of The Advocate.
He was also a member of the glee club. Although
he didn't sing, he taught Sunday school. He took dance class,
but avoided going to the theater because I don't care
for it and it might hurt my eyes. He read
incessantly at a rate of two to three pages a minute.
He boxed and wrestled and hiked. He courted the ladies
(04:42):
and had an active social life. He studied as much
as thirty six hours a week, and in between that
he found time to write two works on ornithology and
begin a book that would later be placed on every
Navy ship the Naval War of eighteen twelve. In the
words of one classmate, Tier was four are at it.
This is someone who was taking issues of productivity to
(05:04):
new levels. According to Marris, here got through such huge
amounts of work due to iron self discipline that have
become a habit. He spent just a quarter of the
day to his desk, but he concentrated so hard and
read so rapidly that he could take more time off
than most other students. But even his time off was
not that RESTful. It was packed with activity. Newport was
(05:25):
so inspired by Morris's description of TRS productivity that he
featured Roosevelt in Deep Work. There's really two factors to
his productivity, you know. One is this idea which I've
I've written about more recently, including in digital minimalism, which
is his belief that action is better than inaction. And
and that's like an interesting idea. I mean a lot
of people, especially today, in a world of easy distraction,
(05:47):
think what they really need is this time when they
have nothing to do, they can just sit there and
watch Netflix while swiping on their phone and just be
bathed and pathed at distraction. They need death to recharge
their they're exhausted. But the t R from this other
school of thought, which says you're almost always better off
from a perspective, recharge your satisfaction doing things, quality things,
(06:10):
hard things all the time. You could be doing hard
things or sleep, And that's it. Throughout late nineteenth century
early twentieth century thinkers, this is a common idea that
action all the times, this quality leaves you better off
than trying to alternate between sort of pure passive for
rest and actions. So I like that. But the other
element is that he really believed in this formula that
(06:30):
I've been writing about for years, which is what you
produce is a function of the time you spend, times
your intensity of focus. And so trs Hack was, let
me take the intensity of focus piece of that equation
and really pump it up as high as possible. If
I can do that, then I can really minimize the
time spent piece and get a lot of things accomplished.
(06:52):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
Marris wrote that Roosevelt plotted every day with the methodism
of a Wesleyan minister, and there's no better example of
that than a schedule of one of his days from
the campaign trail in nine. While incumbent presidential candidate William
McKinley largely stayed away from the campaign trail, vice presidential
(07:15):
candidate Roosevelt was criss crossing the country. The schedule itself
is a testament in his boundless energy, but so are
the statistics of that campaign season. According to Marris, Roosevelt
by November had made six hundred and seventy three speeches
in five hundred and sixty seven towns in twenty four states.
He had traveled twenty one thousand, two hundred and nine
miles and spoken an average of twenty thousand words a
(07:37):
day to three million people. One day on the campaign trail,
his schedule went like this. Seven am breakfast, seven thirty
am speech, eight am reading historical work, nine am a speech,
ten am dictating letters, eleven am discussing Montana mines, eleven
thirty am a speech, twelve pm reading an ornithological work,
twile thirty pm speech, one pm, lunch, one thirty pm
(08:00):
speech to thirty pm reading Scottish novelists or Walter Scott.
Three pm answering telegrams, pm a speech, four pm meaning
the press for thirty pm reading, five pm, a speech,
six pm reading, seven pm supper, eight to ten pm speaking,
eleven pm reading alone in his train car, twelve am
to bed. It's enough to make you want to take
(08:25):
a nap. He had a long history of basically having
these really regimented days. Is that something that you think
contributed to his ability to get a lot done? I
think it absolutely did. A lot of people, especially today,
when they're thinking about their personal productivity, they think in
terms of tasks. You know, what do I want to
get done today? Where's my to do list? Maybe I'm
(08:46):
going to do the most important task of the day.
System where I choose one thing I really want to
get done. But something I consistently discover is that high
achievers are often echoing the Roosevelt approach, which is I
want to actually all keep my attention, which means we
look at a particular day. You're not making a task list,
You're blocking off your hours. What am I doing during
(09:06):
this half hour? What am I doing during these three hours?
You have so much attention to given a day, you're
trying to find the optimal allocations. They also think about
this on higher scales. What am I doing this week? Oh,
Wednesday is the day that I'm gonna have a lot
of downtime in the morning, So that's why I'm going
to really get after this project. That's the idea of
thinking about I have, whatever it is, twelve hours of
attention to allocate in a day. Some of those hours
(09:27):
are going to be higher intensity than others depending on
where they fall. How do I get the biggest return
on that attention. That's an incredibly powerful productivity hack. It's
one that I've been preaching, and I was influence in
that in particular by that approach of of TR. We
know he was even doing that with his leisure, which
I find interesting when he's at Oyster Bay, when he
(09:47):
say his house on the Long Island Sound, you have
pretty structured approaches to I'm gonna go rowing, you know,
I'm gonna roll across the sound, that we're gonna play
these games with the cousins, and we're going to read
or whatever. I mean. Even in his leisure he was
allocating his attention as well. So how does tr compared
to other highly productive or successful people in history. So yes,
(10:09):
that as we talked about before, that manic energy, that
that need to always be doing things, that sort of
distrust of passive relaxation, that's pretty common. I mean, you
see that a lot in let's say, in the business
world and high achievers. That's certainly a definitive trade of
let's say like Elon Musk or Bill Gates for example.
These are people who have this restless this restless drive.
(10:30):
I got to do something, I do something else. I
don't trust passive time, I don't trust recharging. I mean
often to the detriment of their health. That type of
thing is common once you get to a certain level
of productivity, like you're running to you two companies at
the same time, where you're running the country at the
same time that you're writing books, and that's how they
get there. You can't get there without being highly intentional
(10:52):
about your time. Roosevelt's level of activity didn't let up
when he was in the White House. This might be
best exemplified by a project created by archive as Chloe Elder,
who in the summer of was between master's degrees and
doing a remote internship at Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson
State University in North Dakota. Every day she'd clock in
and go through material piece by piece, adding metadata. A
(11:14):
lot of the documents Elder was catalog and where letters
written during Roosevelt's presidency. There's something about being popped down
right in the middle of sone's correspondence. It's immediate, it's
often very intimate. As she was working, Elder began to
notice a pattern. I kept saying this one sort of
standard reply from tr secretary, and it would be something
(11:40):
along the lines of thank you very much for your
letter or your invitation, but President Roosevelt is far too
busy to respond personally, or far too busy to attend
the event or make a speech or read your story
that you've submitted to him. And I just wanted to see, well,
how how busy was he? So she decided to create
(12:03):
a calendar, something that would allow her to visualize just
what a week in the life of President Roosevelt looked like.
She began searching through the digitized archives at the Center,
as well as his desk diaries, which he kept every day. Eventually,
she's zeroed in a week where Roosevelt was sitting for
a portrait by John Singer. Sergeant tr would only pose
for half an hour day after lunch, and it was
(12:25):
apparently very hard to get him to sit still and
not be rushing off somewhere else classic TR. After gathering
all the data and crunching the numbers, a picture began
to emerge, and that picture was action packed. According to
the calendar Elder created, sometimes Tr would hold up to
eight meetings in an hour, meaning that if they were
all equal in length, they would have been a mirror
(12:47):
seven and a half minutes each. But even for Tr,
life doesn't neatly fit into such tidy chunks. Some of
the meetings do look like they're really quick. It says
to pay respects, so that sounds like a brief sort
of introduction. But then there's other meetings, and you could
maybe guess what was going on if you also look
(13:07):
at what was happening politically at the time, or looking
at his letters. But a lot of it is still
a bit of a mystery. And on top of his
busy schedule, he was sending letter after letter after letter.
How many letters did he write that week? Oh, I'd
have to cut up one to three, four, five, six, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
(13:37):
I mean a lot of letters that week. I saw
he regularly wrote more letters than he received on any
given day. Really, in his lifetime he wrote over a
hundred fifty thousand letters. I'm not president of the United States,
and I struggled to return an email. Right, this is
probably a good place for a break. We'll be right back.
(14:03):
In addition to his many meetings and his epic commitment
to correspondence, Tira was also reading around a book a
day and making time to be active. Roosevelt played tennis,
though he was never photographed in his tennis whites. He boxed,
and when he couldn't do that anymore, he took up
jiu jitsu. He swam nude in the Potomac, and he
regularly dragged diplomats to Rock Creek Park to take a
(14:25):
brisk walker, maybe scale a cliff. As one such diplomat
later recalled of a John in the park, he made
me struggle through bushes and over rocks for two hours
and a half at an impossible speed, until I was
so done that I could hardly stand. His great delight
is rock climbing, which is my weak point. I disgraced
myself completely, and my arms and shoulders are still stiff
(14:47):
with dragging myself up by roots and ledges. In one place,
I fairly stuck and could not get over the top
till he caught me by the collar and hauled at me.
He did almost all the talking, to my great relief,
for I had no breath to fair. After he left
the White House, Tier's ability to get a lot done
in very little time loomed large. His successor, William Howard
(15:07):
Taft bemoaned, I would give anything in the world if
I had the ability to clear away work as Roosevelt did.
Me too, will me too? I often say that tr
just makes me feel really tired, because it's like how
how you know? So the key factor seems to be
just an internal engine that gives him such a burst
(15:31):
of energy that he has to be doing things throughout
the day. And I've never seen someone focus it more
intensely than he did. But I'm also in I wish
and I had maybe his energy would probably productive. He
didn't have many of the distractions that we have today.
Do we think that he would be as productive if
(15:51):
he had a smartphone, for example, or the internet? I
don't know. I mean, on the one hand, he clearly
had this huge energy and a huge drive to intensely
do things and to produced things. So he might have
been a figure that was just completely dismissive of why
I don't need passive entertainment. I don't need to say
this is not this is not valuable enough. I don't
(16:13):
want to sit here tweeting and I want to write
a book, right, So he might have been completely dismissive
of it. On the other hand, he was highly curious
and and really attracting the new information, and so when
you're talking about the early twentieth century, what could you do?
You could have smart people in the White House. You
could read books like they were they're inherently very focused activities.
We might see a tr that was so entranced by
(16:33):
all these different rabbit holes he could go down that
that that instead of writing the book on naval history,
he would be watching YouTube videos about not tying or
something like that. And if that, if that latter thing
is true, then that begs the question, how many potential trs,
at least in terms of projective output, leadership, and impact,
(16:55):
are we losing because that huge energy and curiosity. I
need to do things and to act, I need to
produce things. I mean, is that being sacked by an
attention to econmy engine? That is more drumming and finally
two that we've ever had before in history. So that's
the pessimistic that's the pessimistic view, is like, we've been
losing potential trs because of it. But I don't know.
(17:17):
I tend to think he he he wants to produce,
he wants to think big thoughts, he wants to produce
interesting things, he wants to make big changes. He probably
would not be a big user of Twitter. That would
be my guess. If you, like me, are wondering where
Roosevelt found the energy to get so much done, one
clue might be in his coffee intake. He was set
(17:38):
to drink up to a gallon of coffee a day,
and according to his son Ted, his mug was less
like a regular coffee mug and more in the nature
of a bathtub. He put up to seven loaves of
sugar in each cup two But according to Elder, that
might not be Roosevelt's ultimate hack. So what do you
think the rest of us can learn about how to
be productive from R's approach to his schedule. Well, I
(18:03):
wouldn't recommend the gall in the coffee a day, but
I think he found what worked for him as far
as being very productive all the time, and he seemed
to thrive in that sort of environment. Tr wasn't used
to sitting still for more than half hour, and his
his mL was to just keep going and keep moving,
(18:23):
and he was steadfast in that that way of doing things,
and I think that really worked for him. Just to
find out what works best and run with it. And
when Newport thinks about how we can all be a
little more like TR. He thinks of a quote from
an interview Steve Martin did with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rosett
asked him, what's your advice to firing entertainers, and Steve
(18:44):
Martin said, well, the advice I give them, which is
never what they want to hear that, the advice I
give them is be so good you can't be ignored.
If you do that, good things will come. But TR
I think really embodied that as well, that he he
didn't just want to do things. He wanted to do
things really well. He always wanted to be so good
you couldn't norm He was always driven to do things
at a really high level of quality, which sounds obvious,
(19:06):
but I think it's it's really different than a lot
of our instincts today, especially in a world of sort
of attention economy media as well as digital communication, where
we also have this hustle culture which is just being busy, right,
do lots of things, email, lots of people, have lots
of coffees, do a lot of things on social media.
Just the kind of in the mix and crushing it
(19:27):
and and hustling and all this and that will somehow
alkamize into some sort of success, and I think tr
represented a counterpoint to that, which is business by itself
means nothing, Hustling by itself means nothing. Things that you produce,
things that you have shipped, that are so good that
it's hard for people to ignore. That's the foundation for
interesting impact. And so I love the way that he
embodied that business for business sake was not a value.
(19:51):
Intensity towards things that really mattered or might have a
real impact was something he cared about, and I think
there's probably a lot to learn from that today. History
(20:12):
Versus is hosted by me Aaron McCarthy. This episode was
written by me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson. The
executive producers are Aaron McCarthy, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited
by Dylan Fagan and Loeberlante. Special thanks to Cal Newport
and Chloe Elder. To learn more about this episode, check
out our website at Mental flass dot com. Slash History
(20:34):
Versus that's Mental Flass dot com. Slash h I S
t O R y VS. History Verses is a production
of I heart Radio and Mental Floss. For more podcasts
(20:55):
from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you send to your favorite shows.
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