Forgive me, because we’re about to take a break from a week of big and mostly horrible news—a rush to intervention in Syria being the worst, a bank robber throwing cash over Taylor Swift’s fence being the best—and instead contemplate something less urgent, like the seemingly insane work style of Donald Trump. Consider it a form of self-care, as they say these days. Some people inhale peppermint smells; others indulge in off-news musing about workdays that last from 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.

To be fair, it’s not entirely divorced from the news. This past weekend, we saw yet another report, this time from Jonathan Swan at Axios, on how little time Donald Trump spends at the office. Swan reports that Trump is spending about seven hours a day in the West Wing, much of it watching TV in the dining room, then taking off for home to watch more TV. This is consistent with other reports suggesting that Trump’s schedule consists largely of coming into the office to scream at people for seven hours and then going home to tear through cheeseburgers and scream at Fox. Even before the feds raided Trump’s lawyer, the president, according to The New York Times, spent his weekend “engaged in few activities other than dinner at the Trump International Hotel.” Policy discussions seem to be so difficult that the president now gets doses of “Policy Time” once or twice a day. Trump has bowed out of a Summit of the Americas trip, sending Mike Pence in his place, so that Trump can focus on Syria, except that Pence seems to be taking the lead on that, too.

One confounding quality of these reports of Trump’s work style is that they’re at once believable and impossible. A lot of things about Donald Trump’s lifestyle seem horrible and believable (the outbursts, the fallings-out, the homes that look like they were decorated by Saddam Hussein), but one thing that seems non-horrible—too good to be true, in fact—is that the man is at once wealthy yet lazy. We read that Trump lacks the ability to focus for more than a couple of minutes, and, according to Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, such non-focus dates back decades. Yet, if avoiding concentration, dining on burgers, playing golf, and watching TV were a guarantee of riches, we’d have a severe oversupply of billionaires. The mystery of Trump’s non-work is therefore great. Something is missing or wrong.

One obvious yet tempting fallacy is that diligence corresponds reliably to effectiveness. Jimmy Carter was considered hardworking, but his White House spun its wheels. Ronald Reagan was considered work-shy, but his White House accomplished plenty. Trump could still manage to do a lot in a short workday.

Similarly, allowing your day to bulge with appointments of one sort or another doesn’t lead to good results, either. In The Effective Executive, the consultant and educator Peter Drucker wrote that most executives could ditch about a quarter of the things they feel they ought to be doing without anyone noticing or caring. (He also noted that U.S. presidents often start by accepting too many invitations, then go to the opposite extreme of declining them, before finding a balance—so it’s possible Trump is in that intermediate phase.) One example Drucker liked to cite was that of Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime adviser Harry Hopkins, who, although ailing and capable of working only a few hours a day, stayed effective by managing those few hours very well. Many C.E.O.s work hard to keep sizable stretches of their calendar blank.