Barack Obama

Although his presidency is barely a week old, some of Mr. Obama’s work habits are already becoming clear. He shows up at the Oval Office shortly before 9 in the morning, roughly two hours later than his early-to-bed, early-to-rise predecessor. Mr. Obama likes to have his workout — weights and cardio — first thing in the morning, at 6:45. (Mr. Bush slipped away to exercise midday.)

He reads several papers, eats breakfast with his family and helps pack his daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, off to school before making the 30-second commute downstairs — a definite perk for a man trying to balance work and family life. He eats dinner with his family, then often returns to work; aides have seen him in the Oval Office as late as 10 p.m., reading briefing papers for the next day.

“Even as he is sober about these challenges, I have never seen him happier,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The chance to be under the same roof with his kids, essentially to live over the store, to be able to see them whenever he wants, to wake up with them, have breakfast and dinner with them — that has made him a very happy man.”

New York Times, January 28, 2009

George w. Bush

Mr. Bush has always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of guy, and he typically arrives at the Oval Office by 6:45 a.m., Ms. Perino said, for briefings from his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten. He holds regular secure video-conferences with various world leaders, among them the president of Afghanistan and the prime minister of Iraq.

As he has since the beginning of his presidency, Mr. Bush still slips away each day for a workout, and has lunch with Vice President Dick Cheney once a week. On other days, he might lunch with former aides (Dan Bartlett, the former counselor to the president, and Karl Rove, the political strategist, sometimes drop in) or Cabinet members like Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, though according to Ms. Perino, the president does not tarry.

“He’s a fast eater – always ready to get back to work,” she said.

The New York Times, June 6, 2008

John Grisham

When he first started writing, Grisham says, he had "these little rituals that were silly and brutal but very important."

"The alarm clock would go off at 5, and I’d jump in the shower. My office was 5 minutes away. And I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad and write the first word at 5:30, five days a week."

His goal: to write a page every day. Sometimes that would take 10 minutes, sometimes an hour; of times he would write for two hours before he had to turn to his job as a lawyer, which he never especially enjoyed. In the Mississippi Legislature, there were "enormous amounts of wasted time" that would give him the opportunity to write.

"So I was very disciplined about it," he says, then quickly concedes he doesn’t have such discipline now: "I don’t have to."

San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 5, 2008

Unit 4. THE ROLE OF ENGLISH IN THE MODERN WORLD