Along with “alternative facts”, it is likely to be a phrase that will endure long after Donald Trump has left the White House. Private schedules leaked this week showed that the US president spends a majority of working hours on unstructured “executive time”.

Critics were quick to interpret this as a euphemism for lazing in the White House residence and live-tweeting his reactions to Fox News. “There are seniors playing shuffleboard in Boca retirement communities who work more than the president of the United States right now,” the former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough observed on his MSNBC show Morning Joe.

Trump’s allies swiftly countered that “executive time” is in fact full of productive phone calls and meetings. But they did not explain why these interactions are left off the schedule and in effect kept secret even from White House staff.

The debate erupted last weekend when an unnamed source leaked almost every day of Trump’s private schedule from the past three months to the website Axios. The documents showed that the president spends around 60% of his scheduled day in “executive time”, a term coined by his former chief of staff John Kelly. This usually includes the first five hours of the day, from waking up around 6am to his first meeting around 11am.

Axios reported: “The president sometimes has meetings during executive time that he doesn’t want most West Wing staff to know about for fear of leaks. And his mornings sometimes include calls with heads of state, political meetings and meetings with counsel in the residence, which aren’t captured on these schedules.”

The calls and meetings are understood to include the Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, longtime friends such as his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the New York businessman Richard LeFrak, the conservative media entrepreneur Chris Ruddy and the former bodyguard Keith Schiller, and members of Congress including senator Lindsey Graham and the US representative Mark Meadows. He also phones journalists at the New York Times and elsewhere to complain about their coverage.

Yet the interactions do not appear on the daily schedules. Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, said: “It tells you these calls have nothing to do with governing. He’s just clowning around, talking to his pals, tweeting and watching TV. If the calls had any governmental purpose, it would be on the schedule.”

Donald Trump spends a majority of working hours unstructured, according to the Axios report. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

He added: “It’s probably the most dramatic example of this being a president for whom focus and discipline and process are anathema. For presidents, every moment is valuable; to squander this precious time tells you why this White House is so ineffective.”

But White House staff past and present deny that there is anything untoward or sinister about the unannounced conversations. Cliff Sims, Trump’s ex-director of message strategy, argues that it would not be practical to put them on schedule. “All those things are of course documented: the call logs and all of those things exist on the back end,” he told the Guardian. “I just think it would be impossible to actually have a printed-out schedule that’s getting sent out to everybody on the front end saying: ‘The president woke up this morning and decided he was going to do these 10 phone calls, just FYI.’ I don’t see the purpose in that.”

Sims, author of Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, also pushes back hard at the notion that the president is work-shy or addicted to TV. “I do think that the schedules are relatively accurate in terms of big chunks of his day remain unstructured. The thing about it that is unfair criticism is that it’s being used to imply that he doesn’t work hard.

“In my experience, those chunks of executive time when he’s sitting in the private dining room just off the Oval or in the Oval, he was working the phones constantly. He had a steady stream of advisers coming in and something would come to mind for him and he’d call upstairs and get Stephen Miller down there or he’d call over and get whoever to come in and talk to him about whatever is going on.”

Sims noted that the freewheeling approach mirrors Trump’s account in his book, The Art of the Deal, which describes his typical day as head of the Trump Organization and suggests that he believes too much structure stifles creativity, so he prefers instead to make calls, look for deals and improvise. “I think that he approaches the presidency very similar to that. Now, that has its drawbacks and its advantages. I do think that unstructured time does allow him to create that creative chaos, if you will.

“The challenge is more in the implementation of his policy directives. The lack of process for some of those things actually has been a detriment. But this idea that he is sitting there all day watching TV and not doing anything is not an accurate picture of what he’s actually doing in those windows of time.”

Others sympathetic to Trump agree that “executive time” is consistent with an effective management style developed over 30 or 40 years. Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax and a longtime friend, said: “When I first heard the story I thought to myself, ‘Is this a joke?’ Donald Trump is probably the hardest-working business guy I have ever met in my life. His daily grind starts at six in the morning or earlier and goes right to midnight. Sure, he takes out time for golf and some social activities, but these are the exception.

One former staffer described the president’s day as ‘creative chaos’. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

“The media is trying to play this that ‘executive time’ means goofing off watching TV. You have to remember the man doesn’t email or go online. So he works by going on the phone, meeting people, and interacting with people. He is constantly doing that. I’ve talked to a lot of people that are working in the White House or have worked in the White House, and they all say the same thing. He is a virtual Energizer Bunny and is exhausting staff, some of them 40 years younger.”

As in so many other domains, Trump is busting norms for a job in which time is one of the most precious commodities. George W Bush and Barack Obama were known for their discipline. Although Ronald Reagan was perceived to have a “hands off” approach and watched 363 movies during his presidency, he was at his desk by 9am sharp. Bill Clinton, a night owl perpetually running late, reordered his priorities after a “time and motion” study by a deputy chief of staff.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior adviser to Clinton, recalled: “The thing about Clinton is he was up much of the night … He was talking to foreign leaders and others to learn what was going on and he was sending people on missions. He had all kinds of unofficial plenipotentiaries.”

Blumenthal added: “I don’t believe Trump picks up the phone to have any constructive conversation with any foreign leader. He talks to his echo chamber and has a pathetic requirement for narcissistic affirmation. The executive time is a waste of time.”