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Lifehacking for CandidatesThe pros give productivity advice to the presidential hopefuls.

By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008, at 7:29 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

Presidential candidates try to connect with voters in different ways. They bowl. They attend motorcycle rallies. Sometimes they drink boilermakers. They do not, as a general matter, discuss time-management strategies. In a campaign, as in real life, such talk tends to make people wonder about you.

Yet when Barack Obama and British conservative leader David Cameron talked recently in London about their hyperscheduled lives, I found myself fascinated—and sympathetic. And then I wondered if I could help. Sen. Obama, Mr. Cameron, and Sen. McCain, allow me to introduce you to a term you may not have heard of: lifehacking.

In London, Obama and Cameron commiserated about their days, which are arranged in 15-minute intervals of crisis. They react, but they never have time to reflect. Cameron said he tried to not let aides "chalk up" his schedule with too many commitments. Obama's solution was to set aside time to let his brain work during his mid-August vacation. "The most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking," he said, repeating advice he'd gotten from a Clinton administration veteran.

What made the conversation so recognizable was not just the description of a busy life but the way the two politicians exchanged lifehacking tips—those elegant tricks and long-term productivity strategies that help you control your time and attention, which the world conspires to take from you.

I have increasingly become drawn to lifehacking and studying personal productivity because my own commitments have stretched me into transparency. I don't think I have read more than 50 pages in a book without interruption since college. I have stacks of legal pads with notions I've dashed off but haven't had time to think through. I know, I'm often my own worst enemy: I take time to answer rude readers who don't deserve it, and, hey look, I Twitter!

What I'm looking for is the same thing Obama craves—space to think. So I read Linda Stone and Web sites like lifehacker.com and 43folders, where author Merlin Mann found inspiration in Obama's conversation. I've adopted Mann's smart approach to managing the flood of e-mail and turned my life over to David Allen's Getting Things Done system. (I know it sounds like I should be handing out pamphlets at the airport, and I'm OK with that. Except for those hooded robes, which are limiting.)

Given that I've found some halting success, I wondered whether these ideas could help the presidential candidates. So I asked the professionals.

The experts who spend their time thinking about how knowledge workers can be most efficient all agree that Obama is taking the right first step. He recognizes the value of making time to take a programmatic look at his world. Presidential candidates have always had time-management issues. When William Jennings Bryan's opponent heard that he'd given 16 speeches in a day, he quipped, "When does he think?" And there are always events the candidate cannot outsource. He has to give speeches, answer reporters, and keep smiling while a big money-raiser explains his unworkable theory for addressing high gas prices. Long plane flights offer little rest: The candidate studies policies, talks to staffers, answers starlet e-mail, and makes decisions about ads, where to campaign next, and just how hard to hit back against an opponent. I asked McCain's top staffer Mark Salter when the candidate has time to himself to think, and he said: "In the shower."

A candidate needs to set aside time to think because campaigns conspire to crush him. We all know what it's like to come to the end of a day of e-mails and interruptions and wonder where the previous 12 hours went. Now imagine that feeling in a day that's six hours longer and you're forced to spend most of it behaving artificially. When you're a candidate, the press, your strategists, and voters determine who you are, and each day you must either fulfill or refute the cartoon, usually by moving through a range of unnatural behaviors—constant repetition of the same talking points, feigning umbrage, or sometimes just by playing dumb.

At the end of the day, a candidate feels not just numb but also displaced. A string of hasty tactical decisions puts him in danger of contradicting his core message. After running on Straight Talk, he's fibbing. After vowing to change the old style of politics, he's practicing the old tricks themselves. "You lose the big picture," as Obama put it to Cameron. "You lose a feel." This not only affects judgment but also threatens success. While candidates are engaged in an enterprise that drives them away from their authentic selves, voters are craving authenticity.

Candidates have long known to create what Linda Stone calls receptive distractions, those little vacations that give them time to think. Bill Clinton used to read mystery novels on the campaign plane. McCain and Obama watch sports to get their minds off the day. (Obama is reportedly better at this than McCain, whose aides may ban him from watching late-night cable news because it winds him up.)

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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