The Obvious Strategy to Take Back Your Time - Jonathan Swanson - #1047
Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2026
⏱️ 72 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | How did you get started in thinking about time and delegating? |
| 0:06.6 | So my first job out of school was working at the White House, and I worked for the president's top economic advisor. |
| 0:13.9 | And I got to walk in the West Wing every morning, which was a cool life experience. |
| 0:18.3 | And I sat next to the president's executive assistants. |
| 0:22.5 | And as you might imagine, the executive assistants to the president are really freaking good. |
| 0:27.1 | And it set my bar crazy high for what this client EA partnership could look like. |
| 0:34.4 | And so when I left the White House to start my first company, I asked myself the question, |
| 0:39.1 | what if I had an assistant or a team of assistance that was as good as the presidents? Obviously, |
| 0:45.0 | I'm not going to become president, but what else could I accomplish if I had that sort of support? |
| 0:48.9 | And so I hired my first assistant that way and then set out on a journey to build the best team I could |
| 0:55.4 | to see how it changed my life. What were the unlocks that you saw inside of the White House? |
| 1:00.9 | Like how complex and big is the system of spindly octopuses with their tentacles and everything |
| 1:08.4 | trying to help get the machine moving? I mean, it's insane. The president has multiple assistance, as you might imagine. |
| 1:14.8 | There's actually an entire department called advance that plans every minute of the president's |
| 1:19.8 | life for months in advance. And so if he's going to be in Brazil in three months, |
| 1:25.1 | there's people deployed months in advance to go scope, prepare everything. And, you know, I think there's just kind of the level of |
| 1:33.2 | optimization, which is one thing. But the thing that really struck me sitting next to the president's |
| 1:38.9 | assistance is seeing the relationship they had. It wasn't just saving him time or doing tasks for him. At the end of the |
| 1:47.5 | day, he would sit down, lean back in his chair and be like, what happened? And he would talk to his |
| 1:53.9 | assistant. And this was one of the people he trusts most in the world. There's all these other people |
| 1:58.6 | jockeying for his attention, governor, senators, |
| 2:06.5 | and his eight chiefs. But this assistant is the one person who's just got his back fundamentally, |
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