Best productivity story from this book: a White House worker brings President Eisenhower a piece of unopened mail addressed to the President. Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope” and he drills into his team that nothing comes to the President unless it can’t be resolved at a lower level, and when it comes to him he needs to be briefed and presented with his staff’s best thinking and possible options.
> Ike immediately says “No one should ever bring me a sealed envelope”
This is correct to the best of my knowledge; the actual opening of said mail should have been handled by the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, established in 1897.
I was a bit curious about what this process looks like in relatively modern times, and found this video from the President Obama White House YouTube channel from 2009: