Aiden Singh: What’s the typical day-to-day of a newly-elected Mayor look like?

Ben McAdams: You know, initially everybody wants to meet the new mayor. And you've got stakeholder groups and community groups who come in and have a meeting with the mayor.

So the first nine months are exhausting because you're just squeezing in every meeting on top of trying to set the groundwork and drive an agenda. So the first nine months are just - every minute is consumed.

I remember asking my assistant at one point, can you set up a meeting on this topic that we're working on? And she said, ‘well, your next opening is 6 weeks away’. So I couldn’t even get something on my own schedule sooner than 6 weeks. And I remember at one point realizing that I could spend 4 years just taking meetings with people.

And that's not what I wanna do.

I wanted to get stuff done. And so, about 9 months into it, I kind of restructured and decided that I wanted to take control of my schedule. I still wanted to be available to meet with everybody, but I also needed to be able to have a proactive agenda and meet on the things that I wanted to meet on.

So I think for any newly-elected official, meeting stakeholders is an important part of it. Everybody's having their annual awards dinners and celebrations that you need to attend. So the hours are crazy - working from 7 AM and then leaving the office and going to a dinner for a local rotary club, or boys and girls club, or stuff like that every evening.

So the schedule was 7 AM to 9 PM, for that 1st year, probably. Just exhausting. Some of that is unavoidable and an important rite of passage. But about 9 months, a year into it, I said I've got to be able to make sure I have time to also accomplish what I want accomplish - what I promised my constituents I would do.

So it's a demanding job, I think, for any newly-elected official. That transition period is like drinking from a fire hose.

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