The Napoleon Technique: Postponing Things to Increase Productivity

Optionality: In addition to "letting things resolve themselves", one benefit you can sometimes get by deferring a decision (esp a "one-way door" decision) is optionality (of learning information that might result in a better decision).

Waffling: On the other hand, if you are a manager or decision-maker on whom others depend, one of the worst things you can do is waffle on a key decision (ie, be indecisive). Andy Grove has a paragraph on this in High Output Management as one of the highest negative leverage things a manager can do to their team, and in fact, often a wrong (but correctible) decision is far better than no decision.

Good managers instinctively know how to navigate these tradeoffs.

We postpone not by choice, but by indecisiveness. Not just the 'things that will solve themselves', but also the things that will loom bigger and bigger over us until the built up stress breaks the veil.

It works, even very well as long as you also have the right skill combinations to deliver very fast eventually, but the cost is stress and in the longer term burnout and depression.

Would not make a single decision.

All his projects failed and those around hated him, there was a lot of joy after he was fired. This lack of decisions costed the company a ton of money.

This guife is maybe made for the rare few who end up with a clean inbox every day.

I forget the source of that, but it makes me chuckle.

Sometimes I even push it to the next day by setting a reminder for 09:00. The only downside is that Slack doesn’t seem to have considered this workflow. Instead of giving me a single notification that several messages are ready for follow‑up, I get multiple push notifications on my phone. It’s a bit irritating, but it’s still the best option for now.

Everything will suddenly become "URGENT" then.

This what I do 90+% of the time, I work with my ADHD and put off doing as much as I can until the last minute. Then do weeks worth of work in hours.

To note: If you're thinking of doing this, be careful, it can be extremely stressful

Only do it on stuff you're good at or understand the implications if it goes wrong, because this method doesn't allow much time to change your mistakes.

If its something new i will not do this (or i'll break it down in chunks)

This works well with children too!

And probably beneficial for them. Their natural instinct is to ask for help. Many times I can't get there immediately and so they ultimately figure it out themselves. Once I figured out this "trick" I started doing it more often. I suppose most parents figure this out along the way.

My 9-year-old is playing Tears of the Kingdom right now and I've noticed he's getting better and better because I'm not jumping in to help him.

I swear, AI is decreasing everyone's reading and writing abilities.

Well written language conveys maximum information (or emotional impact, or etc) with minimum verbosity. AI is incentivized to do the exact opposite, and results in slop like the above.

The quoted paragraph above takes 71 words to say "You should do this technique if the positive potential outcomes outweigh the negative ones," which is such a banal thought as to have been a waste of the reader's time, the writer's time, and the electricity it took to run an AI to generate those sentences.

  Clever & Lazy: Ideal leaders for high command, mentally sharp but avoid unnecessary action, making sound, difficult decisions
  Clever & Hardworking: Excellent for the General Staff, diligent and smart, ensuring details are covered
  Stupid & Lazy: Harmless for routine duties, don't cause trouble
  Stupid & Hardworking: Dangerous, must be removed as they create unnecessary work and cause damage

I've been able to distinguish between the two by asking:

Does the lack of information prevent the task from being completed?

Will it be less expensive to complete the task later?

Am I holding off to avoid discomfort or to obtain clarity?

Delays typically pay off if they lower uncertainty. In most cases, it doesn't make anxiety worse.

I've tried concrete things:

Put my reasons for delaying something in writing.

Instead of setting a date, set a "revisit trigger."

Try it for five minutes to see what hurts the most.

I'm curious what other people think of this:

How can procrastination be distinguished from strategic delay?

Do you put off making decisions longer than taking action?

Do you use any heuristics?

The Second Law says an imbalance (like heat in one corner of a room) will "solve itself" by spreading out until the room is balanced. The Napoleon Technique assumes that a "social imbalance" (a crisis, a frantic email, or a minor conflict) will often "cool down" or reach a state of balance on its own if you simply wait.

In my part of the world, we call this technique "let it rot out" :-)

I have a friend who worked at an AI company before the current boom, and he once told me something along the lines of: we built several things over the past few years that could now be replaced by the new frameworks that keep appearing.

* Many layers to this joke. Think about his imprisonment and escape. To keep it thoughtful: The impact of the Code Napoléon is massive. With a tad bit less expansionism and a tad bit more realism and economic development large parts of the world would be "more French" now.

Fires will eventually burn out, the result will be simple to understand. Simply your business won't exist anymore.

There are more nuanced examples but I believe the above explains the principle.

The Key is to handle things early, before the most probable/default resolution, if its one you're not happy with.

This does have two disadvantages: I do read everything and sometimes I see or talk to somebody before my response reaches them. But I'm also not Napoleon.

Its something I deploy to low-stakes instant messaging communications. So you might get a:

'Hey quick one can you help with <request>'.

I can see the request but defer acknowledgement.

If its low-stakes then I sometimes leave it for 15 minutes and then acknowledge it up and its amazing how many times I do that I get a:

'Ahh no prob, sorted it out'

The tricky part is building enough trust that people don't feel ignored. I've started replying with "I'll look at this tomorrow" rather than going silent. Same delay, but it signals intentionality. People seem fine waiting when they know you've acknowledged the request.

Though I'll admit the line between strategic delay and just being slow is thin when you're managing multiple things at once.

- It’s okay not to respond to emails/messages/requests immediately.

- But if you know a response will take time, acknowledge the message and say so.

It’s simple: the sender gets a clear signal that their message was received and isn’t left wondering whether it got lost, accidentally deleted or ignored.

This doesn’t actually contradict the Napoleon technique... if anything, it softens the “he's ignoring me” factor while still protecting my time and attention.

Other responders have also talked about Google inbox which I never used but even those of use locked away in enterprise fiefdoms with Outlook can make use of pinned messages (same as starting in Google Inbox) and recently also can be reminded about emails. I use both combined with the approach of trying to clear my inbox as close to zero unread each day as possible. I do same to slack messages as well. For all "messages" I ruthlessly delete or archive anything not needing action and with no legal or revenue impact.

THats how I manage the torrent of comms. Need to improve my work on larger items to start earlier and produce in smaller chunks.

For keeping track of all my work I used Obsidian with tasks and tags and put due dates on all. Helps me see what is due for each "project".

My 2c.