
The Napoleon Technique: Postponing Things to Increase Productivity - EndXA
https://effectiviology.com/napoleon/
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PureParadigm
I think this can definitely save you time in some cases, but usually at the
expense of other people. For example, if someone asks me for help on something
because I'm more familiar with it, my spending five minutes to answer their
question might save them an hour of troubleshooting. Here, the Napoleon
technique would save me time but only by wasting the other person's time.
Eventually this might come back to bite me, perhaps if that other person is
now an hour behind on a task that helps me.

And from the perspective of someone asking for help, it can also be really
frustrating to not get a response. Slow responses give the impression that the
other person is not paying attention. Any sort of reply, even a quick "I'll
follow-up by the end of the day" is much better than no response at all. This
shows people that you're listening and that they can trust/count on you.

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DharmaPolice
Responding to every message/request with a "I'll get back to you by X" takes
you away from the task you were otherwise doing. This may not matter, but it's
often yet another diversion. Most of us are paid/valued on the basis we can do
sustained work and responding to adhoc queries is only a small part of that.

I think there is a peril in responding immediately (which I tend to do) - you
set a weird informal SLA that people then expect you to meet. I've had people
call me and say "Hey I emailed you this morning - are you ignoring me?" \-
they're kind of joking but not really.

It's tough to balance. I agree with you - sometimes, me spending five minutes
not only saves someone else an hour, it saves me hours later on when I have to
unpick something someone else has done. The skill is trying to identify those
critical points without interrupting what you're doing every time you get a
mail/IM/whatever. A good team helps with that.

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RandoHolmes
That's why you don't respond immediately. My policy is that if it's super
important they'll either come by my office or they'll call me directly.

Anything else, and it gets looked at during specific times of the day. Once
everyone is aware of this policy, they know that emailing me won't get an
immediate response, and they accept that.

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DharmaPolice
I've met a few people who do this. Out of interest, what times of the day do
you use for email?

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RandoHolmes
morning and after lunch. Sometimes if I have downtime at the end of the day
and don't want to start something else up then at the end of the day as well.

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andersource
This seems to me like a noisy proxy to simply not doing unimportant things,
relying on hindsight instead of judgement to identify them. I guess the
technique could work but I prefer actively trying to identify things that
might look important but really aren't. In addition I'm not too fond of
"communicating" by lack of communication or intentional delays - if I think
someone can figure out something on their own I might say "Listen, I'm short
on time right now, but I think it's not too hard - try searching for XYZ".
Similarly for other issues mentioned in the article such as employee
initiative. Again, this technique might work here, but I feel that there must
be a better way to encourage initiative than ghosting them.

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quickthrower2
This is a great perspective. I would at a minimum batch up reading emails so
one can get some deep work done. Maybe twice a day is ok for reading emails in
general. Depending on the situation it could be more or less. Reading Deep
Work by Cal Newport can help figure that out.

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obviyus
Nothing against this specific post but with the massive influx of productivity
YouTubers and Medium morning routine gurus I increasingly feel like
blacklisting the word “productivity” entirely.

~~~
BrianOnHN
What would it look like if this wasn't a problem?

More specific topics? More credibility?

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king_magic
Credibility would help. I don’t need career guidance from a glorified
Instagram model, I’d like it from someone who knows what they are talking
about.

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nefitty
I asked GPT-3, and this was the advice it returned after a conversation about
my goals/feelings and with me prompting it with, “The life coach begins
telling you about some ways to make progress on your goals.”

“The life coach tells you to create a daily schedule and plan out your week,
month, and year. He tells you that if you follow through on this plan, you
should achieve something. He also tells you to meditate for at least 10
minutes a day and focus on your breath.”

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Rapzid
GPT-3 is going to corner the market on drivel. RIP self-help industry.

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lordofmoria
I actually did this by accident this summer after coming back from a 2 week
vacation and being snowed under by a project immediately left me with about
3-4 weeks of backed up emails - I found that my “rate of required response”
even for completely legitimate emails from colleagues and externals went down
to (roughly) ~50% from ~90%.

Unfortunately, what this doesn’t capture is the loss of social capital you
experience when you ignore people. It’s not worth it in my opinion - Gmail and
Outlook both have great canned responses and a simple reply can make people
feel heard and respected. That comes in useful if you ever have to emerge from
your cave and ask for help. I guess if you’re Napoleon, you don’t need social
capital because you run everything, so YnapoleonMMV.

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roland35
In the 7 habits of highly effective people book, this concept is nicely
illustrated by a 2x2 grid with the axes "urgency" and "importance".

There are a lot of urgent but unimportant tasks such as emails or letters in
Napoleon's day, and those distract from the important but less urgent work (ie
your job). Obviously you need to deal with the urgent AND important
interruptions, and trying to find a balance is always going to be difficult
when the interruptions start coming in!

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BrianOnHN
Also known as the Eisenhower matrix
[https://www.google.com/search?q=eisenhower+matrix](https://www.google.com/search?q=eisenhower+matrix)

~~~
quickthrower2
What’s the Eisenhower Eigenvector?

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alangibson
I've been consciously and slowly applying this technique more and more. I've
noticed several things in the process.

1\. Parkinson's Law is real. Most requests for help are people just creating
work for you that they could, with a small amount of effort, solve themselves.
By not responding to trivial requests, you encourage people to learn to solve
their own problems. The invariably do, and in doing so never need to ask you
again.

2\. Problems cluster together. It's also frequently more efficient to solve
many clustered problems in one go than it is to solve them one at a time as
they pop up. Instead of constantly working on my wife's Windows laptop solving
the annoyance of the day, I now give it a lashing once a month.

3\. Delaying decisions is a good thing. You will have more information the
longer you wait. Many times you will make a different, better decision later
than you would if you had pulled the trigger early.

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wimagguc
Oh wow, I did this for the better part of my grownup life without having a
name for it. I called it "Self-Solving Problems" after reading "SEP field" in
a Douglas Adams book:

"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us
see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem)

~~~
juliushuijnk
Once used a cheap hosting company that didn't allow to post tickets in the
weekend. I asked why, they said 'because by Monday most people have solved the
problems themselves. I replied; by that logic, you should only allow tickets
one day in the week, perhaps for a single hour on that day..

I guess my point is; it makes for bad customer service to not communicate.

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abiogenesis
They have a point though. They are not working on the weekend, so it does not
matter whether you file the ticket on Saturday or Monday. If you solve the
issue yourself they don't have to do anything. If you can't, you can always
file it at 9am.

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soco
I have a negative feeling about this, it gives me that "self centered jerk"
vibe... no, I will definitely not let people wait just to "teach them a
lesson" then rationalizing it "I'm doing it for their own good". If I cannot
answer I say "sorry no idea", if I can answer I answer when I have time - and
that will happen when I can make time. And if it's really burning they'll ping
me again and I'll see what I can do then.

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maxs
Ever since Gmail has introduced "snoozing" functionality I have been using it
for this type of prioritization. If I receive an email, I will snooze it to a
later time in the day/week when I will be going over random stuff. Unless the
email needs a response right away, in which case I will reply to it
immediately. In this way, I can achieve "inbox zero" which I have found helps
a lot emotionally!

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jonpurdy
I wonder if there's a way to snooze emails using time spaces like how SRS
systems (like Anki) do it. First snooze is for 1 day, second for 3 days, etc.

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keiferski
This seems to describe most items in the 24/7 news cycle. If you only read a
newspaper once a week, 95% of the ‘issues’ that arise would have solved
themselves and/or been exposed as not actually being an issue.

~~~
nicbou
I'd extend it to pretty much every feed.

It seems like whether you leave for an hour or a month, you'll have more or
less the same number of notifications.

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kwijibob
I used this while working in IT support.

If I responded immediately people never figured stuff out.

I pushed it too far and the CEO threw a temper tantrum in my doorway.

Only use this technique on lower staff levels. :)

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cgio
In similar terms is the approach to never do today what you can do tomorrow;
by tomorrow the requirements may change. I find it a very effective technique
in implementation projects where things tend to change a lot. There is a
balance to be had between the speed the world changes around you and the speed
of your response. Finding this balance depends on how much engaged and
passionate you want to be about the things you do.

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dalbasal
This might conflict with a lot of corporate ball passing.

A lot of times (I find), such emails are intended to move something from the
senders' inbox/todo list onto yours.

That said, there are times and place where delaying responses/involvement may
help. Earlier stages of projects can be the time when everyone throws in their
2c, but no real decisions or actions can be taken. When deadlines loom and
decisions must be made, that changes.

I wouldn't recommend adopting one technique or another very broadly, but it
probably is a good idea to adopt the general approach of thinking
strategically about these things. Also worth noting the Napoleon was dealing
with a very new and radical approach to hierarchies and such. He was probably
experimental generally in his generalship. A generation earlier, his
techniques may have not worked.

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mikece
While not precisely the same thing, it reminds me of the lesson of delegation
in Tim Ferris' book _Four Hour Work Week_ where he kept increasing the amount
of money for which customer service subordinates were pre-authorized to settle
customer service disputes. The result was a near complete drop-off in messages
that passed the decision to him and an increase in customer satisfaction. The
effect is the same -- have subordinates solve problems instead of kicking it
up the chain -- but it's proactive and empowering as opposed to sending the
message that I'm going to treat your concerns as so irrelevant that I'm not
going to acknowledge the message unless it becomes a major catastrophe.

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082349872349872
TIL if my friend had thought to postpone by weeks instead of days he might've
conquered europe?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291990)

~~~
scollet
Don't answer emails in Winter.

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pydry
This is the "whomever shouts the loudest gets their work done first" anti
pattern. It evolves naturally - it doesn't seem to be something people do
deliberately.

I've noticed this in a lot of working environments. It means shrill and loud
complainers get their shit done first and they get to look more effective so
they get promoted and end up running the show.

It works if and only if the shrillest and loudest people have the best ideas
and the most important work.

It works provided the shy less bothersome people are shy and less bothersome
because their work is unimportant and pointless.

i.e. maybe it worked for napolean but IME it's a fucking disaster.

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buddhiajuke
I have pretty sharp productivity/energy/focus fluctuations and often achieve
more by waiting for the “inspiration” (so to speak) to come and do tasks
quickly than by slogging through low times. But they’re pretty sharp:
sometimes something might take me two hours at low tide and ten minutes at
high tide.

Then there’s the issue of what to do at low tide.

I’ve tried countless times to adhere to Pomodoro or Jocko Willink-type
mindsets that willpower is fickle while discipline equals freedom. But the
results don’t seem to be there.

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tonyedgecombe
I've found responding to customers very quickly often generates extra work for
very little benefit. Slowing the cadence seems to encourage more thoughtful
messages on both sides.

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reportgunner
We used to call this "Solve it by waiting" at my previous job.

It was a very effective solution for many kinds of problems.

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smcleod
At times it somewhat relates to the theory of constraints - where spending
time optimising non-constraints will not provide significant benefits to the
system. Obviously there is a balance between under and over optimisation,
nothing is black and white.

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jonathanstrange
This reminds me of a friend's interpretation when I told him about the
_Getting Things Done_ method: Ah, the famous " _You_ better get things done!"
method. It's the best method.

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ozim
I just immediately thought about this quote from Dune: "Give as few orders as
possible. Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders
on that subject."

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growlist
When everything's urgent, nothing's urgent.

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bra-ket
also called "the asshole technique",very popular with people playing power
games

