Hi. I’m Katie Sullivan, and this course is titled time management for political appointees. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.

This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands. As a former state trial court judge of a very busy court and the head of the office of justice programs at the United States Department of Justice, I know the importance of time management. I promise if you are chosen to serve our next president in the administration, you will find out you can and must get more accomplished in one day than you thought you could do in a month. Whether you are in the White House or an agency, this is your chance to truly make a difference by putting the priorities of the president that you support into action.

We are not here to mark time. We’re here to make change. In order to make the most of your incredible opportunity, you will need true time management skills. You will find you are in high demand once you are working for the president and juggling the massive numbers of meetings, speeches, emails, potentially managing a calendar, and quick turnaround on tasks from your superiors. All the while learning about your agency and the federal government, implementing the president’s agenda requires significant multitasking talents.

You are chosen in part because you are up to the task. There are 5 areas of time management this training will cover. Your 1st month, effective communication, external meetings, internal meetings, and document review. You will learn about some of these topics in-depth in other trainings. Here, we are just going to focus not on the substance, but on how each of these categories require effective time management.

So let’s dive in. The 1st month. The first thing you wanna do is empower your political staff. If you have political staff in place upon your arrival, spend time meeting with them before you meet with career staff. For instance, I had 6 senior political staff who answered to me.

And when I took over, the bureau at the Department of Justice, I spent my first few days doing nothing but meeting with not only the senior political staff, but all the junior political staff in the building as well. This is a very important thing to do because you will get a tremendous amount of feedback, from the political staff about what is going on in the office and will help provide you with the right direction and the right people to talk to when you when you do arrive. It also empowers, and this is very important, it also empowers your political appointees, to do the job that they have been appointed to do. You are making it clear to career staff that your political appointees are in charge, in essence. And this will save you a tremendous amount of time down the line so you aren’t trying to explain that or having to deal with, you know, any kind of conflict between political staff and career staff.

You’re setting that boundary right from the beginning. This sounds like, common sense, but you will truly have to carve out the time to meet with your political staff and task them with the jobs that ensure the president’s agenda is implemented. Please don’t assume that your political staff knows what they are supposed to be doing in your particular office. So carve that time off. The next best time management, tool in your 1st month is to really try to stack the deck in your favor.

There is a saying, personnel is policy. When you first arrive, you need to inquire and find out how many political spots are allocated to your office, to your agency. You can go through your White House liaison and, potentially, presidential personnel to find out what’s available to you. How can you bring in people to support the mission of the president with you? It’s very difficult to do that on your own.

You’re gonna end up doing everything, by yourself regardless of what level you come in as a political. So you wanna build up your team as quickly as possible. Recruitment takes time. Sending resumes and and having conversations and interviews, that takes time. That is time very well spent in order to bring people in who share your vision, the president’s vision, and your vision of how to implement the priorities of the administration.

The next thing is learning your agency and becoming very familiar with your office. And, again, I’m putting this 3rd on purpose. So the first thing is to set that goal and that boundary that will really serve you later on so that everybody understands the way that things are are going to run. You wanna spend time getting to know your agency. Who do you report to?

What are the expectation in those meetings? When I first landed, at the Department of Justice and actually was running the Office of Violence Against Women, I found out that I had a quarterly meeting with the deputy attorney general 2 weeks after I started. It was very important to me to attend that meeting by myself, without career staff, assistance because it was important to start to foster relationships with other politicals. So in order to prepare for the meeting, my staff briefed me. I did research on my own.

I asked a lot of questions. I actually learned the office, came up with an agenda, found out how the deputy attorney general liked to run his meetings, what his read aheads needed to look like. That set me up for every quarterly meeting that I had with the deputy attorney general going forward. I also reported to the associate attorney general. Actually, that was monthly.

And, again, finding out how to prepare for meetings and what’s expected of you in the first meeting will save you so much time down the line. So please take time getting to know that. Get familiar, obviously, with your office. Who’s your senior staff? Who who what role do they play?

Who, responds directly to them? It’s really important to differentiate between senior executive service or SES employees and schedule c or GS employees. Your senior executive service employees are people that, you’re gonna you will want to identify, for certain personnel reasons. Also know how long you as a as a junior staff, as someone whose principal hasn’t shown up, you can start to read executive orders. Make a book of executive orders that’s prepared and ready for your principal when upon arrival.

So be proactive if you show up and even if your principal isn’t there. Find out everything that you can and be ready to prepare them. And this, again, will save a tremendous amount of time both for your principal, and it will get you up to speed very quickly on how your office works. Now the next thing that you’ll wanna do is to meet with senior career staff, again, depending on your position in the office. I do recommend that when you first start to meet with careers as a time saving measure is to keep the initial meetings to 20 to 30 minutes and hold those meet hold that boundary.

Hold the meetings to that period of time. Ask your senior, staff or the career staff that you’re meeting with the for the first time to be prepared to tell you their greatest priorities are about the most important project they are working on. This is a huge time save. I know that when you first arrive to the in the office, the career staff wants to be very helpful, and they have a tremendous amount of expertise and understanding in their lane. You have to know about everything going on in the office so they can monopolize your time trying to brief you on every single detail when you first walk in the door.

Again, as a judge, I know that there is only so much information that any person can retain at any given time. So you keep those meetings to 20 to 30 minutes. It’s gonna tell you about priority, who actually listens to direction and who doesn’t. It’s going to give you an out, so you don’t get stuck with this big, weedy conversation. And at that point, you can then, as you go forward, start to increase times of meetings.

In the first, position I had, I was an 89 person office with about 68 full time career staff. And I just met with every single person. I met with senior staff, obviously, for about 30 minutes apiece, and then I met with every other career federal staff person for 15 minutes. And it was an excellent even though it took a couple of weeks, it was an excellent use of time. It told me so much about the office and quickly familiarized me with each person individually.

And now the calendar. The calendar. So many people wanna run away from the calendar. I wanna say embrace the calendar because it is it’s an extremely important tool. It is basically who gets in and out of the door.

So there’s a tremendous amount of power. There’s also a lot of responsibility with the calendar. But the first thing I would say for anyone coming in is to limit access to your calendar. Do that on day 1. This will save you so much time.

Career staff will oftentimes, if they have access to your calendar, will put meetings on your calendar without your knowledge and without necessarily the process for vetting that you’ve put in place. In my experience, I found career staff, really took huge blocks of time on my calendar, and would put meetings on with with them in order to take up my entire day. So it was very difficult to get anything else completed. So you wanna limit access to your top and trusted staff and have read only access to senior staff who just needs to know where you are. Make sure you have make it a policy that no meeting is put on the calendar without you or your political staff’s approval.

You wanna be very flexible in your 1st month, open minded, ready to pivot. Also, this is a big Washington DC tip. Leave your house early. Schedule lots of time around meetings if they are out of the office. I was late to a meeting once.

I left in what I thought was plenty of time, and it just I ended up being late to a really important senior meeting. And it’s a mistake I will never forget. When my friends asked me about what the transition was like from my, my hometown to Washington DC, I said everything’s great except I’m late all the time. And being someone who takes time management so seriously, that was just terrible. The traffic in Washington DC is very tough.

Ubers will take 6 to 10 minutes to get to you. Plan for the worst, and make sure you leave enough time to get to where you need to be out of the office. The next tip we’re gonna talk about is effective communication. You will save so much time if you communicate your preferences, policies, and internal direction clearly from the beginning if you’re a senior staff member, and ask questions if you are a junior staff member. Remember, on some level, every single political appointee is junior to someone.

In my case, it was to the attorney general, his staff, the deputy attorney general, his staff, and the associate and her staff. Cabinet secretaries are actually junior to the president. Everyone has a preferred process to learn is the point. It takes it’s a true time saver to call their assistants or chiefs of staff to find out what their expectations are for their meetings, written presentations or memos, and travel. If documents are being, sent back and forth, they are in the and they’re in the incorrect format, you’re going to waste a lot of time simply because of a format issue.

So just find out how people want things. A meeting request at the White House has a very particular form. You can’t just send an email to your friend who works over there. So you need to make sure the form is filled out correctly. You really are wasting time to not find out about these processes.

Remember also to inquire about process when a person moves their position. So what that means is if all of a sudden your supervisor, your superior changes, then you need to find out how they like things done. It won’t be the same as the as the person before them most likely. If you routinely take half an hour for lunch, you will have to ask your assistant to schedule that time. If you want to go to your child’s soccer game, get it on the schedule.

If you get to work at 7 AM and want political staff there with you, communicate that need. So much time is wasted when staff are guessing what a principal wants. I spent so much time rebooking my own travel one time because I did not effectively communicate my needs and preferences on my first trip. Lesson learned. Things move so fast in the administration.

Effectively setting die deadlines is imperative. You must then communicate the deadline. More on that when we talk about documents. Internal meetings is another topic, to discuss with time management. Federal career employees are used to having a lot of meetings.

When I saw the schedule of internal meetings with career staff that was set prior to my arrival, I wondered how I would ever get the president’s priorities implemented. Set regular meetings with for no more than 45 minutes with senior staff on a regular basis. I found that 2 times per month, was reasonable. To prepare for meetings and ensure everyone is ready, junior staff can pull together an agenda. Meetings should always be forward looking.

How is your office advancing the presidential agenda? How are they implementing the president’s priorities? If a topic is raised, which starts to monopolize the time, set that topic aside and schedule a separate, maybe 15 minute meeting for the staff who are interested. If stakeholders or other people from outside the government are coming in for a meeting, be sure there’s a thorough vet of the individuals and their organization. This will enable the meeting to be focused on the issue at hand, not holding endless get to know you kind of conversations.

Career staff will try to place their favorite groups or stakeholders on your calendar. Be sure those groups are thoroughly vetted, and the staff responsible can explain why this meeting is vital to your day, to the president’s agenda, before recommending it to your principal or putting it on the calendar. Prepare. Prepare. Prepare.

Internal meetings with senior officials are a priority. If the cabinet secretary or deputy secretary wants to schedule a meeting, that takes priority over the rest of your schedule, which can mean, again, a quick adjustment of a calendar. A meeting at the White House is obviously a priority as well and is something I hope every one of you politicals get the opportunity to do to attend. While you’re over there, make sure that you do take some time to soak in the history and beauty of the EEOB or the West Wing, depending on where your where your meeting is. And meet with some friends or maybe even go thank the PPO staff who spend so much time and energy onboarding you.

That being said, know that most meetings at the White House are at the staff level. Start right on time and end exactly when they are scheduled to end. If someone is mid sentence, I was in many meetings where this happened at 2 PM, and the meeting is scheduled to end at 2 PM, people will just stand up and walk out. This is because they are so booked back to back with meetings that the that they have to stay on schedule. We simply have so much to do in order to have the country that we all desire and want, and only potentially 4 years to get it done.

So don’t take that personally. And if you are gonna speak in a meeting, make sure it’s done succinctly, and it is a good use of everyone’s time. Now we’ll talk about external meetings. If you are headed to a different agency, the same vetting rules apply to your internal meetings. Know who you are meeting with, get their bio, and what their office does.

Make sure you know who’s going to be in the meeting and what topics are going to be discussed so you can be prepared and not waste anyone’s time. Conferences. Now you will be invited to a lot of confer conferences. Career staff usually encourages you to get out of the office and go to conferences. It is very important to take these opportunities to highlight the great work of the president and and our agenda.

Most of you will not have the time to stay for the entire conference. Of course, if your principal believes that for some reason you need to be there, then by all means. If you are invited to speak, show up an hour or so before, have a meeting with your host, give your speech, take some time to thank the host, talk with some people after, and leave. However, because you’ve traveled to this conference and you’re somewhere else in the United States, be sure to research and see if the agency fund if there are agency funded programs or grant recipients in the area. Set up as many meetings as possible with grant recipients and agency programs as you can.

This is a very worthwhile use of your time. You are serving these people and the people of this country. And by seeing their successes instead of always meeting in Washington, DC is a great use of your time. For instance, I always made a meeting with the US attorney in the area where I was speaking and multiple grant programs as well. One thing to remember, even though not everyone that you’re going to meet with agrees with your policies, do not let that deter you from making these visits.

Speaking to organizations, associations, and grant recipients may be one of the most important parts of your job, which is letting people know what’s actually happening with the president’s agenda. Now congress. Your visits to congress will usually be set up through your office of legislative affairs. Your time commitment is really preparation. You need to know everything about your office, the topic that your representative wants to discuss or the staff people want to discuss, the your appropriations.

Every level of political should be involved in the preparation for these meetings. And our final topic today is document review. Finally, after all of this, the internal meetings, the external meetings, the politicals, the White House, the rescheduling, all the things that we’ve already talked about, now we’re gonna talk about the paper. You will never receive as many emails as you will in the federal government. On top of all the emails are all the policy documents, rules, proposed rules, grant applications, internal documents, external guidance that needs to be reviewed and edited.

Reviewing and editing documents for external release and and internal use is perhaps the most important task you will have while in the administration. Documents must be edited so they are precisely in line with the president’s agenda. Familiarize yourself with every executive order that is executed and use those orders as your guidance for all document review. I know it’s already been a long day. You had back to back meetings from breakfast.

It’s already 7 PM. Now is a great time to tackle some documents. Plans are also quite a good time to catch up as well. Remember, if a document is hung up with you, you are literally stopping the president’s agenda from moving forward. My friends, weekends and nights may be a thing of the past for your time while you are in the administration.

Just remember, every single minute counts, and every single minute is worth it. Enjoy this precious time. It will be the best, most special time of your professional life. There is nothing like serving your president.