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Based on the photos of Obama kiteboarding off the coast of billionaire Richard Bransons private island in the Caribbean, few of us will ever have the chance to vacation like our former president. But by examining the daily habits he developed over his eight years in one of the most intense working environments in the world, we can all learn how to work like Obama.

This Presidents Day, whether youre a creative professional, budding entrepreneur, or seasoned CEO, studying Obamas modern approach to the pressures of presidential life will provide you insights into how you too can better manage the stress and responsibilities in your own day-to-day.

Put Your Body to Work: Obama started most days of his presidency with 45 minutes in the gym, alternating between lifting weights and cardio. It was a way to clear his mind and prime it for the day to come, especially since he steered clear of caffeine. Obama told journalist Michael Lewis, You have to exercise, or at some point youll just break down. The Lesson: Although it doesnt have to be as soon as you wake up, all of us need to incorporate exercise in our lives. Studies show that the simple task slows aging, and improves cognition, among a slew of other benefits.

Preserve Decision Making: Look back at pictures of Obama over the course of the presidency and you may notice that he is usually wearing a blue or gray suit. Using the latest neuroscience findings, our former president attempted to extract all the little decisions one makes in a day (what to wear and eat, for example) so that he could avoid decision fatigue, and have more energy to decide on the life-or-death matters that come with leading a country. The Lesson: Form habits and routines that eliminate tiny and inconsequential decision from your day, so you can focus on the important stuff.

Understanding How You and Others Think:Obama recommended reading Daniel Kahnemans book about decision-making, Thinking Fast, and Slow to better understand why and how people make decisions. In the book, Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, explains the pros and cons between going with your gut (called a System 1 thinker, like George W. Bush) and thinking things through (or System 2 thinker, like Obama). The Lesson: Knowing your biases and approach to decision making, allows you make better decisions and understand competitors, partners, and employees mindset.

Compartmentalize to Survive: Obama became a master of compartmentalizing his time and focus over the course of his presidency. Theres no better example of his skill than the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, where, just before Obama got up to poke fun at our current president for his insistence that was not a U.S. citizen, he had just ordered the raid to capture Osama Bin Laden. The Lesson: Have the discipline to compartmentalize the challenges and roles you need to play in your professional life.

Seek Advice: Obama is known for tapping experts from a wide range of disciplines, like Reid Hoffman, John Doerr, and Malcolm Gladwell for advice for his presidency and beyond. And although not all of us have the ability to set up meetings with famous writers and venture capitalists, we can consult our networks to get different perspectives and strategies. The Lesson: Broaden and nurture your network.

Communicate Decisions Clearly: Obama utilized a memo system with his aides, so that majority of them would come with three options: agree, disagree, or discuss. Stating clearly and concisely about how he felt about each issue allowed the president to communicate his decisions to his staff more effectively. The Lesson: If you have people relying on your decision, make sure you are clear in both what your decision is and the way you communicate it.

Be Prepared and Punctual: Unlike some other presidents (former and current), there was rarely a memo that passed by Obamas desk that he didnt read. Obamas economic advisor, Larry Summers,stated it was a certainty that if someone had a meeting with the former president and had sent him a memo, he would have read and understood it, and would be irritated if the author tried to explain it. Obama would start the meeting on time, and end the meeting on time. The Lesson: Time is your most precious resource. Dont waste yours or others because of a lack of discipline and expectations.

Make Time for Family: Nearly every night of his presidency, Obama would sit down with his family at 6:30 p.m. to have dinner, despite the constantly emerging crises around the world. Obama would reconnect with his daughters and the First Lady to find out about their day and decompress. The Lesson: If the president can make time for his family, so should the rest of us.

Focus on Others: Good entrepreneurs know that the best way to evolve a company or product is to not only listen to your staff, but, most importantly, the end users themselves. Obama had his aides sort through his mail to choose ten letters that he would read each day. The Lesson: Know your customers and develop strategies to make sure you hear them no matter how high up you rise.

Find Some Me Time:Maybe its the early morning, or the late afternoon, when you can finally attend to all the built up items on your to-do list, but for Obama, the self-proclaimed night guy, its the wee hours that distraction-free time when he could hide away in the White Houses Treaty Room. There, he could take his time fine-tuning speeches, watching ESPN, or playing Words With Friends. He also went out of his way to read fiction and history, which gave him perspective and an escape from the daily grind. The Lesson: Find time every day to get away from work, rejuvenate, and put your mind in a different space.

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Work Like Obama: Management Secrets From The World's Toughest Job - Huffington Post

New York Times

For-Profit Schools, an Obama Target, See New Day Under Trump New York Times Under the Obama administration, the Education Department discouraged students from attending for-profit colleges, arguing recently that the data showed community colleges offer a better deal than comparable programs at for-profit colleges with higher ...

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For-Profit Schools, an Obama Target, See New Day Under Trump - New York Times

Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly officially ordered federal agents this week to begin arresting and deporting more illegal immigrants, releasing them from the handcuffs the Obama administration had imposed, and making headway on one of President Trumps chief campaign promises.

While young adult illegal immigrant Dreamers are still exempted, agents were told there are no longer any other special classes of people that should be considered off limits for deportation.

Those caught at the border are to be swiftly shipped back, Mr. Kelly said, and he freed agents to target a broader universe of illegal immigrants for deportation from within the interior of the U.S. The secretary said agents are still to give priority to those with criminal rap sheets, but are free to use discretion taken away from them in the Obama years to detain anyone they believe to be in the country illegally.

It is not intended to produce mass roundups, a Homeland Security official said, briefing reporters on two new memos Mr. Kelly signed Monday.

The memos set the groundwork for building a wall and call for hiring 5,000 more Border Patrol agents, 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and 500 more officers for the Air and Marine operations at Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Funding those priorities will depend on Congress.

Secretary Kelly also said local police who want to help enforce immigration laws will be welcomed, rather than rebuffed, as they were under the Obama administration.

SEE ALSO: Trump takes off kid gloves, moves to erase Obamas deportation exemptions

Drafts of the memos had leaked in recent days, sparking feverish outcry from immigrant-rights groups who said they were a major step back in respecting illegal immigrants.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats vowed scrutiny and resistance.

We need an immediate public examination in Congress of these heavy-handed, anti-family policies, said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat. The Senate should also pass the bill Ive sponsored to repeal the mass deportation order. The Republican-controlled Congress has an urgent responsibility to do its constitutional duty and act as an independent check on President Trump.

The two memos are watered down slightly compared to draft versions that leaked last week. Rather than being instructed they should arrest most illegal immigrants, as they were in an earlier version, agents are now told they may arrest anyone they deem a priority.

But overall, the memos are designed to carry out Mr. Trumps first two immigration executive orders, signed Jan. 25.

The new memos do not address his extreme vetting policy, signed Jan. 27, which has become ensnared in court battles. An updated memo on vetting is expected later this week.

Under President Obama, immigration enforcement was chiefly a border matter. If migrants could sneak into the interior or, even if they were caught at the border, if they were part of a class Mr. Obama deemed protected, they were given low priority and allowed to disappear into the country with millions of other illegal immigrants.

Mr. Trump dramatically expands that border area both south and north. The policies will put pressure on Mexico to do more to stop the flow of people coming through its territory, and will also unleash immigration agents and prosecutors in the interior of the U.S. to arrest and deport migrants who would have been considered special classes under Mr. Obama.

But many of those details remain to be worked out.

Use of expedited removal a swift deportation will be expanded to cover more people. But the department will first go through a complex regulation process to figure out exactly how far it wants to go.

We will see what happens there. Were not going to start changing this today, a Homeland Security official said.

Likewise, the official said they wont immediately begin using a part of the memo that calls for shipping illegal immigrants caught at the U.S.-Mexico border back into Mexico while they are awaiting their deportation cases. That will happen in time, the official said.

This would say ok, if you want to make a claim for asylum or relief from removal or whatever that case may be, were going to hear your case, but youre going to wait in Mexico, the official said.

Officials said there is no numerical goal for total deportations, and pushed back against charges from immigrant-rights advocates that mass deportations are in the offing.

We dont need a sense of panic necessarily in our communities here, one department official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity. What were doing is were simply executing the laws passed by the United States Congress.

See the article here:
DHS cancels Obama policies, orders agents to expand deportations - Washington Times

President Trump is preparing executive orders aimed at curtailingObama-era policies on climate and water pollution, according to individuals briefed on the measures.

While both directives will take time to implement, they will send an unmistakable signal that the new administration is determined to promote fossil-fuel production and economic activity even when those activities collide with some environmental safeguards. Individuals familiar with the proposals asked for anonymity to describe them in advance of their announcement, which could come as soon as this week.

One executive order which the Trump administration will couch asreducing U.S. dependence on other countries for energy will instruct the Environmental Protection Agency to begin rewriting the 2015 regulation that limits greenhouse-gas emissions from existing electric utilities. It also instructs the Interior Departments Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to lift a moratorium on federal coal leasing.

[Scott Pruitt, longtime adversary of EPA, confirmed to lead the agency]

A second order will instruct the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to revamp a 2015 rule, known as the Waters of the United Statesrule, that applies to 60 percent of the water bodies in the country. That regulation was issued under the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gives the federal government authority over not only major water bodies but also the wetlands, rivers and streams that feed into them. It affects development as well as some farming operations on the grounds that these activities could pollute the smaller or intermittent bodies of water that flow into major ones.

Trump has joined many industry groups in criticizing these rules as examples of the federal government exceeding its authority and curbing economic growth. While any move to undo these policies will spark new legal battles and entail work within the agencies that could take as long as a year and a half to finalize, the orders could affect investment decisions within the utility, mining, agriculture and real estate sectors, as well as activities on the ground.

Trump, who signed legislation last week that nullified a recent regulation prohibiting surface-mining operations from dumping waste in nearby waterways, said he was eager to support coal miners who had backed his presidential bid. The miners are a big deal, he said Thursday. Ive had support from some of these folks right from the very beginning, and I wont forget it.

[Barack Obamas evolution on climate change]

Bloomberg reported several elements of the executive orders Friday.

The greenhouse-gas limits on existing power plants, dubbed the Clean Power Plan, represented a central components of President Barack Obamas climate agenda. The regulations, which were put on hold by the Supreme Court and are being weighed by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, direct every state to form detailed plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from such sources as coal-fired power plants, enough to decrease carbon pollution by about one-third by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.

Trump repeatedly criticized these and other rules aimed at reducing fossil-fuel use as an attack on the U.S. coal industry. Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who served on Trumps EPA transition team, said the president is fulfilling his campaign promise by directing key agencies to shift course. Ebell warned, however, that undoing these rules will take time. It could take days, months and years.

President Obama has used his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act to create national monuments 34 times, more than any other president. With an incoming Trump administration vocally opposed to Obama's executive actions on many issues, will those monuments continue to stand? The Post's Juliet Eilperin explains. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

[A call to modernize a coal leasing program thats cost taxpayers billions]

One measure lifting the moratorium on federal coal leasing could take immediate effect. That freeze has been in effect since December 2015, and last month the Interior Department proposed major changes to a program that guides coal exploration and production across 570 million publicly owned acres.

Days before Obama left office, the Interior Department issued a report saying the federal government should explore options that include charging a higher royalty rate to companies, factoring in the climate impact of the coal being burned through an additional charge to firms and setting an overall carbon budget for the nations coal leasing permits. But the new administration has expressed little interest in pursuing these policies and appears to be opening up the option of coal leasing again without any preconditions.

The House has already passed legislation that wouldeliminate a BLM rulecurbing the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas operations on federal land. The resolution, which needs Senate and presidential approval to take effect, uses the 1996 Congressional Review Act to reverse one of the final rules the Obama administration issued. While Trump administration officials have discussed whether to address methane regulation in the upcoming executive order, it may not be included in light of Congresss recent action.

Separately, Trump and his deputies are reopening a question of water policy that has bedeviled government officials from both parties for two decades. Two Supreme Court decisions that came down during the George W. Bush administration, in 2001 and 2006, spurred uncertainty over exactly which bodies of water fall under the federal governments jurisdiction. The Bush administration worked on drafting regulations to address the issue, but once Obama took office the EPA began rewriting them. The current rule gives the federal government wide latitude to protect smaller tributaries as well as some, such as wetlands, that may be dry periodically, on the grounds that they still need to be preserved as critical water supplies.

But groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation argue that the new restrictions could require farmers to pay significant fees to gain federal permission for filling in areas on their property and could halt some operations altogether.

Hunter and angler groups, however, have expressed concern about any rollback of the rule, which they say will preserve wetlands and other habitat that is crucial for outdoor recreation.

If they have a better way to do it, were all for it, said Whit Fosburgh, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. But we want to make sure the wetlands and streams covered in the Obama rule can be covered in whatever they develop as a replacement. Thats our bottom line.

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Trump to roll back Obama's climate, water rules through executive action - Washington Post

The C-SPAN survey ranks presidents on leadership qualities, including public persuasion and crisis leadership. Video provided by Newsy Newslook

Just weeks after leaving the White House, President Barack Obama ranks as the 12th best U.S. president overall in a new poll of historians conducted by C-SPAN ahead of Presidents Day.

It's the first time Obama was eligible for the Presidential Historians Survey, which asked 91 historians to rank all 43 former presidents across 10 categories. Those include"Pursued Equal Justice for All," in which Obama ranked 3rd, and "Relations with Congress," in which he ranked 39th.

Abraham Lincoln retained his top spot for the third time in the poll, which debuted in 2000 and last took place in 2009. Other consistently high-ranking presidents include George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom made the top five overall in each survey.

Also notable: George W. Bush bumped up three spots to 33rd since the poll's 2009 edition, while Bill Clinton stayed steady at 15th.

The biggest loser since the 2009 survey is Andrew Jackson, the populist president whose portrait adorns the wall of President Donald Trump's Oval Office. Jackson dropped five spots, from 13th to 18th.

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No honeymoon: One month in, Trump's approval ratings are sagging

James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce have taken the bottom three spots in each edition of the poll, C-SPAN noted, beneath even William Henry Harrison, who held office for only one month.

A team of advisers, including professors from Rice University and Howard University, guided all three of C-SPAN's surveys, approving criteria, assisting with participants and overseeing collection of the results.

See the entire poll and rankings for past editionsat C-SPAN.

Follow Josh Hafner on Twitter:@joshhafner

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Obama ranked 12th best president by historians in new C-SPAN poll - USA TODAY