What the forty-fourth president has to say about reading novels, making fewer decisions, and finding time to think.

Reading about Barack Obama on the internet can take you to some strange and unsettling places. But it’s just as likely to take you to an amazing place. Digging into the online archives of Obama-related content can bring joy and inspiration. It can make you wistful and nostalgic. You’ll find videos that make you smile, videos that make you cry, and videos that make you smile even as you’re crying.

At a time when it’s easy to feel cynical and hopeless, I find it both comforting and useful to take the occasional tour into the depths of the Obama era, if only to remind myself that the way things are right now is not the way they have to be. You can engage in politics in good faith and without sacrificing your values. You can be caring, empathetic, and thoughtful, and you can still win elections. You can conduct yourself with decency and integrity, while also getting things done. Politicians can be a force for good. Politics itself can be a force for good.

Scanning the electronic universe of Obama content also offers some more practical lessons. One of the many consequences of the celebritization of the American presidency and our collective fascination with the lives of individual presidents is that we know an enormous amount about Barack Obama, and not just his views on health care, foreign policy, or marginal tax rates.

We also know what he likes to read, how he makes decisions, and how he structures his days. We’ve learned how he gets things done, how he consumes the news, and how he prioritizes the activities that are most important to him. These insights might not be particularly profound, but they’re still meaningful, particularly in the context of the demanding job of the presidency.

“Being president doesn’t change who you are,” Michelle Obama said in her speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. “It reveals who you are.” The First Lady was referring to character, temperament, and moral leadership, but she would’ve been just as accurate (if somewhat less inspirational) had she been speaking about time management and personal development. Here are three pieces of advice, distilled from countless articles, interviews, and profiles, that President Obama has shared in his years in public life.

Carve out space to think

During Obama’s final summer in the White House, The New York Times published an intimate look at what the headline called “Obama After Dark: The Precious Hours Alone.” The article became infamous for reporting that the president’s “only snack at night is seven lightly salted almonds” (which, reflecting the occasional absurdity of the political media, Obama later felt compelled to clarify was a joke). Tree nut discipline aside, the article revealed a lot about how Obama works and thinks.

The Times described a president who spent “four or five hours largely by himself” every night, doing everything from reviewing briefing materials and constituent letters to drafting speeches, reading books, and decompressing with games on his iPad. Because his job required so much processing of information — “an insane amount of paper,” as his friend and former chef Sam Kass put it — Obama needed this solitary time to do the things that a day full of meetings, speeches, and decisions didn’t allow for. Things like thinking. Processing. Reflecting. Reading. Writing. “Working deep,” as the author Cal Newport would call it.

George Shultz, who served as secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, took a similar approach. Every week, as New York Times columnist David Leonhardt wrote, Shultz set aside at least one hour for “quiet reflection.” During this hour, Shultz held no meetings, took no phone calls, and permitted no interruptions (unless his wife or President Reagan called). The only thing in front of him was a notepad and a pen. Shultz’s “hour of solitude,” Leonhardt explained, “was the only way he could find time to think about the strategic aspects of his job. Otherwise, he would be constantly pulled into moment-to-moment tactical issues, never able to focus on larger questions of the national interest.”

Beyond casting your ballot or following the news, your life may not require you to consider “larger questions of the national interest.” But you don’t have to be a diplomat or world leader to benefit from carving out time to think and process. Surely you find yourself overwhelmed and distracted by “moment-to-moment tactical issues” more often than you’d like. Surely there are times when you’re dealing with a “constantly full inbox,” as Obama described the presidency to the BBC. We all have too much to do and too little time to do it.

In her memoir, Becoming, Michelle Obama writes about what she calls “the Hole.” That’s the room her husband stakes out, wherever they happen to be living or staying, as a space to think, write, and “flip between the six or seven books he’s reading simultaneously.” Spending time in the Hole “seems to fuel him,” she observes. It’s “where insights are birthed and clarity comes to visit.”

You may not be able to set aside a physical space for working and thinking, but you can always carve out some mental space. If you want to find the time to read, write, think, or reflect, you have to make the time. President Obama sought out these hours alone because, as his former chief of staff told the Times, he recognized that he needed a “place where it can all be put aside and you can focus.” No matter how high your expectations or how genuine your intentions, this time won’t happen on its own. If you want time to think, you have to prioritize it.

Make fewer decisions

Many psychologists, journalists, and self-improvement writers have opined on “decision fatigue,” the possibly real and possibly manufactured idea that we have a finite amount of willpower and decision-making strength on a given day. As with several other well-known psychology studies, the research supporting this concept (which is also known as “ego depletion”) faces increasing scrutiny for its inability to be replicated.

Regardless of the concept’s scientific validity, though, the lifestyle validity of decision fatigue is not in doubt. Few things drain our reserves of attention, focus, and creativity more quickly than making decisions and switching constantly between different tasks and responsibilities. Unfortunately for presidents, making decisions and switching constantly between different tasks and responsibilities is a large part of the job description.

In a cover story in The Atlantic, John Dickerson argued that the presidency is not a difficult job but an impossible one, owing to the impossibly large number of decisions we expect presidents to make, and the impossible correctness and foresight with which we expect them to do so. “The relentlessness of the job depletes a president’s powers of restraint,” Dickerson writes, “and yet restraint is crucial for wise decision making.” As Lisa Monaco, who served as Obama’s advisor for homeland security and counterterrorism, told Dickerson, “The urgent should not crowd out the important. But sometimes you don’t get to the important. Your day is spent just trying to prioritize the urgent. Which urgent first?”

That type of work environment is why Obama made decision fatigue part of his mental framework. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” the “decider-in-chief” famously said to Michael Lewis for a Vanity Fair profile. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” In the White House, as Obama put it, “you need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

It’s impossible for a president to lead and govern effectively by making decisions on the fly, reacting impulsively to whatever happens to come across their radar and agonizing over meaningless and petty things as they go. Successful presidents know they need to prioritize the most difficult and consequential decisions, and they have no choice but to cut back everything else that falls short of that threshold. The have to automate and build systems that keep everything but the most important stuff from reaching their conscious mind and draining precious time and attention.

While the presidency demands an especially high volume of high-consequence decisions, these challenges are just an extreme example of something we all face every day. We all have too many decisions to make and not enough time or energy to make them, or at least to make them with as much thoughtfulness and consideration as we’d like.

But some decisions matter more than others. “Routinizing” your decision-making, as Obama put it, isn’t just a reactive mechanism for coping with a busy life. It’s a proactive tool for making better decisions and for spending your limited mental and emotional bandwidth on decisions that help you build a more fulfilling life.

If you spend your days navigating through small, inconsequential decisions, you’re not going to have the mental strength for the big ones. If you waste your attention and energy on shallow tasks, you’ll have little attention or energy left for the stuff you actually care about. Fighting decision fatigue is not something you have to do to keep up with the small stuff — it’s something you choose to do to make time for the big stuff.

Read fiction

Memos. Intelligence reports. Policy briefings. Speeches. News articles. Letters from the public. The job of president has (traditionally) required a lot of reading of a lot of different types of content. By default, though, the job doesn’t leave much time for reading books. And, one might assume, any spare time that is available for reading books would be consumed by material directly related to the job — a biography of a predecessor, perhaps, or a detailed look at a particular moment in history. Information and facts, in other words. Not stories. Not fiction. Not fantasy.

Yet throughout his time in office, President Obama read all sorts of books, including novels. “Most every night in the White House,” Michiko Kakutani reported in The New York Times, Obama “would read for an hour or so late at night — reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction… to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction.” In Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis observed that the desk in Obama’s private White House study was “piled high with novels.” Obama’s annual book lists have always included more than just nonfiction.

By all accounts, Obama’s interest in fiction predated not just his presidency but his entire political career. As a student at Occidental College, Craig Fehrman wrote recently in Literary Hub, “Obama read fiction because he wanted to experience psychological interiority.” In the mid-80s, Fehrman noted, Obama even “started writing fiction of his own, eventually completing several stories he shared with his fellow organizers.”

Why would this interest in fiction follow him to the White House? Obama explained in a two-part conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson (who he endearingly calls one of his “pen pals”) published in The New York Review of Books. “When I think about how I understand my role as ‘citizen,’ setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels,” Obama said. “It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”

During his presidency, “fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and was a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this country,” Obama told the Times. “I found myself better able to imagine what’s going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because not just a specific novel but the act of reading fiction. It exercises those muscles.”

I don’t subscribe to the time-management aphorism that says, “If the president can make time for it, so can you,” which is sometimes deployed to motivate people to build a new habit or take on some sort of self-improvement project. If a president can find time for something, it’s because they are the most powerful person in the world and have thousands of people working for them. If they say, “Make sure I can exercise tomorrow,” exercise will be on tomorrow’s schedule.

What matters is the act of prioritization, not the time management. A president can always make time for something — if they choose to do so. Obama is not the first person in history to see novels as a means of learning, growing, and understanding the human condition, but it’s significant that he chose to prioritize reading fiction, even when doing so might seem immaterial to the immediate responsibilities of his job.

For too long, I made the naive mistake of characterizing fiction as an indulgence. I saw novels as a way to relax or zone out, not a way to learn or grow or exercise my brain. That sort of knowledge transfer, I was certain, came from heavy-duty nonfiction — history, biography, science, psychology.

Yet novels are just as powerful a tool for learning and growing. They help us develop empathy and show us new ways of seeing the world. They enable us to better understand ourselves and other human beings. They provide clarity about what we think and what we believe. They give us the opportunity to explore different ideas and step outside of our current moment-to-moment dramas and dilemmas.

You don’t have to be the president of the United States to feel overwhelmed by the pace of life and inundated by information and distractions. When the world seems unrelenting or incomprehensible, immerse yourself in a novel. Or carve out a little space to think. Or see if you can cut back on the number of decisions you have to make. Just because Barack Obama did these things doesn’t mean you have to. But if it worked for him, it might work for you, too.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the first in a series. The second part will be published in the coming weeks. Portions of this article are excerpted from my book, Reframe the Day: Embracing the Craft of Life, One Day at a Time.