Ike Was a Life Hacker

This week I started reading John Dickerson’s new book, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. I’m enjoying it.

One of the insights Dickerson offers early in the book is that Dwight D. Eisenhower was what we would today call a life hacker. “He thought about not just what he did but how he did it,” Dickerson writes, “and developed systems to make himself more efficient.”

When Ike first entered the White House after his inauguration in January 1953, the story goes, an usher handed him a letter and he batted it right back. “Never bring me a sealed envelope!” he said. Nothing, he explained, should come to him without first being screened to see whether it merited his attention.

Dickerson credits Eisenhower with having designed the four-quadrant prioritization model popularized by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First.

According to Dickerson, Ike encapsulated his approach to priorities in the maxim, “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”

But not even everything that’s truly important merits the president’s attention, Dickerson suggests, due to the persistent danger that the White House will spread itself too thin. He quotes the productivity expert Merlin Mann, who says, “Priorities are like arms. If you have more than two, you are crazy, or you’re lying.”