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The Napoleon Technique: Postponing Things to Increase Productivity
- phosphophyllite 6y ago"Being idiot" to increase scientific knowledge.
- wimagguc 6y agoOh 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 6y agoOnce 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.
- abiogenesis 6y agoThey 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.
- PureParadigm 6y agoI 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.
- shock 6y ago> 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. Other people learning new stuff is not a waste of time.
- strogonoff 6y agoI think there's certain hubris in wanting to be the person who has helped. Maybe I was not the first on the list to ask for help. Maybe I am not the last. Maybe someone else will explain it better and quicker. Perhaps I underestimate how easily the person in trouble can find a good resource online and, indeed, learn from it. (Maybe they underestimate themselves, too!) I suffer from this tendency myself. It often feels nice to be helpful.
- snvzz 6y ago>Here, the Napoleon technique would save me time but only by wasting the other person's time. The premise is that your time is way more valuable than somebody else's. And they're wasting it.
- soco 6y agoThat assumes I'm much more valuable to the team than the other person. Real life has not many Napoleons though...
- DharmaPolice 6y agoResponding 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.
- smcleod 6y agoAt 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.
- andersource 6y agoThis 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.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThis 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.
- reportgunner 6y agoWe used to call this "Solve it by waiting" at my previous job. It was a very effective solution for many kinds of problems.
- roland35 6y agoIn 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!
- BrianOnHN 6y agoAlso known as the Eisenhower matrix https://www.google.com/search?q=eisenhower+matrix https://www.google.com/search?q=eisenhower+matrix
- quickthrower2 6y agoWhat’s the Eisenhower Eigenvector?
- 082349872349872 6y agoTIL 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 6y agoDon't answer emails in Winter.
- maxs 6y agoEver 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!
- jonpurdy 6y agoI 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.
- soco 6y agoI 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.
- obviyus 6y agoNothing 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 6y agoWhat would it look like if this wasn't a problem? More specific topics? More credibility?
- king_magic 6y agoCredibility 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.
- nefitty 6y agoI 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.”
- Rapzid 6y agoGPT-3 is going to corner the market on drivel. RIP self-help industry.
- keiferski 6y agoA world in which everyone enjoys/is driven to complete meaningful work and doesn’t need to hype themselves up to get anything done. Presumably this was implicit cultural knowledge in the pre-modern era, as the self-help productivity genre is a recent phenomenon.
- 6y ago
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI'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.
- pydry 6y agoThis 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.
- keiferski 6y agoThis 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 6y agoI'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.
- kwijibob 6y agoI 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. :)
- cgio 6y agoIn 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.
- mikece 6y agoWhile 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.
- dalbasal 6y agoThis 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.
- growlist 6y agoWhen everything's urgent, nothing's urgent.
- buddhiajuke 6y agoI 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.
- jonathanstrange 6y agoThis 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.
- alangibson 6y agoI'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.
- lordofmoria 6y agoI 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.
- ozim 6y agoI 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."
- bra-ket 6y agoalso called "the asshole technique",very popular with people playing power games