Busy people in "The West Wing"

[mtbc]

In The West Wing (1999) the senior White House staffers chronically work very long hours. How does this make sense? Is it good for their cognition to be ongoingly compromised? Can there not be enough staff to take on the workload? Perhaps the problem is that they would not be able to leave notes for each other or that they do not have enough room to put all the people or something. It does seem as if there has to be a more effective way for them to work. Maybe we are supposed to believe that they are so superlatively good at their jobs that even half-asleep they outperform some next-best people who might instead be on duty to catch some acute situation.

Comments

[mindstalk]

Workaholism seems pandemic. But I imagine at that level, a lot of what's being done is hard decisions. Up one level, I think Obama said that any easy decisions were made before they reached his desk. If your job is making decisions in the sense of balancing competing interests, that's arguably pretty hard to delegate. Not like plugging in another doctor or programmer.

[emperor]

I think senior civil servants (especially those working closely with ministers) also often end up working very long hours. This has always struck me as daft.

[penta]

Random dreamwidth person commenting! Hi!

Unfortunately, the long hours portrayed in that series are actually truth in television. White House staffers at all levels work insane hours, the higher you go the worse it gets. There's a reason why almost nobody stays past 4 years, and most burn out around 18 months to 2 years in: The hours suck.

Additionally, the Executive Office of the President, the WH staffers we all see and are familiar with? 300 people, maximum. Doing everything. They're supported by a ton of people in other organizations, but a lot of the hard stuff falls on them.

In return and in slight compensation, most of them are set for their future careers (note that most WH staff are very young - 20s and 30s - George Stephanopoulos was (in)famously 33 or so when he started working at the White House).