The Napoleon Technique: Postponing things to increase productivity

This is something I've thought about a lot, and while I like the framing in the article, it's missing a few key dimensions.

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.

This is ketamine for procrastinators. Use at your own risk, YMMV.

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.

I hadn't realized there was a name for this! (i thought it's just procrastinating)

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)

I really miss Google Inbox, for the tasks feature (that was never brought over to GMail as promised when it was discontinued). It had a great implementation of a postponing feature. I liked having tasks as inbox items just like emails, as emails usually also represent tasks, so having them in the same place was perfect. I'm likely to ignore any other task app, but I always check my email, so I'd always see the postponed tasks when they came back around.

At work I call this "letting the fires burn."

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.

Is it the Napeoleon Technique or Ostrich Effect to decide not to read the news? I’ve been doing this for the past ~1 year and I’m much happier for it. I’m torn whether I’m just being a bad citizen/selfish or genuinely just not paying attention to things that I have no influence over.

One piece of advice I got from my manager early in my career that really stuck with me is this:

- 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.

I've found that sometimes it's easier to put off a task. At other times, it simply becomes avoidance. ~

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?

"Never do today what you can do tomorrow for tonight you might die" - Ajahn Brahm

This resonates with something I noticed in client work. A surprising number of "urgent" requests resolve themselves if you wait a day - the person either figures it out, realises they asked the wrong question, or the underlying situation changes.

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.

I do this at work and now I can put a name to it :)

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'

Napoleon failed in the end in Russia exactly BECAUSE he had postponed too many things.

My first teaching job was at a prestigious boys’ boarding school. A colleague who had the next desk in the staff room was also head of the first-formers’ boarding house, which meant he received an awful lot of emails from anxious parents about their not-quite-so-anxious sons. He left all these emails unread for a fortnight, because after this time the issues (or non-issues) had usually resolved themselves.

Since no-one mentioned the Cynefin framework yet: Notice that there's a little fold at the bottom centre of the diagram: Chaotic (unknowable unknowns, etc) things will always resolve themselves to simple states.

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.

Didn't he basically observe the second law of thermodynamics?

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" :-)

It can be combined with rules as a pre-condition. For example: I have a CC box where mail is moved to where I am in CC. As I am mentioned in CC, I do not expect immediate action is required, and I will postpone the activity of reading or other action for that mail and 999 out of 1000 times it will resolve itself. Now this is a very easy and clear example of a rule, but there are many like this to manage the workload to manageable levels. It allows me to work part-time for multiple customers, while often being more productive then full time employees.

Have used it quite often. It goes well with "pick your battles". As the article pointed out, the trick is to schedule the tasks(mostly non-urgent ones which fall into top-right of the Eisenhover matrix) and check the progress on it.

"Politics is the art of ignoring a problem until it goes away."

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

Reminds me of the Volcano Technique for filing (old school paper) - don't file it, as it piles up the 'hot' documents tend to end up in the middle of the pile near the top.

In the 19th Century British Foreign Office the Napoleon Technique was called "masterly inactivity". For instance "the Russians are threating Afghanistan, so we must move troops up to the NW Frontier". No! Not every action merits a reaction.

I have a nice application of this technique: when I saw some good discount of something online that I'm not sure whether I really need, I put it aside. Later when I looked at it again, it is often out of stock, so nothing to think about anymore.

I'm a big believer in this. I called it "let them marinate". It works particularly well in the modern world of IMs, where a lot of people see a problem and go "oh, X will know why this is happening, let's ask him!" without even trying to get their brain-gears moving. After a while, you learn who you should ignore and for how long, and it reduces the incentive for the worst time-wasters to come to you. I used to worry that they'd find me less useful and hence stop liking me, but that doesn't really happen.

I asked for a help to my manager for some point in my job. He didn't respond to me for almost 4 hours than I figured out how to resolve the issue by my own. I noticed that when I read this article. He used this technique it actually worked in my case!

See also: Napoleon's "four types of soldiers":

  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 use this technique in Slack by setting a reminder on a message so I can follow up later.

Sometimes I even push it to the next day or week 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.

The technique is very role-dependent. It works well when (a) others are capable of resolving things on their own, and (b) the cost of delay is low and bounded. In environments with unclear ownership or asymmetric information, delaying can just push coordination costs downstream or silently create resentment.

I'm doing the opposite: I respond immediately but use Gmail's scheduled send to send it at a later time.

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.

Napoleon ultimately was a master in Getting Things un-Done.

* 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.

As a lifelong procrastinator this article reads like "that other Napoleon" aka Eisenhower and his "delegate" for anything neither important nor urgent. I use it when I'm one of several recipients in emails To: address.

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.

All government officials know this technique, that is why they are so effective

This works great when you're on the receiving end of e-mails/ messages. However it is a pain to deal with when you are on the sending side and your issue is urgent.

> you can choose to let people know that if they absolutely require an immediate response then they should include “URGENT” in the subject line

Everything will suddenly become "URGENT" then.

Isn't the quintessential example of this putting off post-life choices like your will? At that point, it's no longer your problem.

It has happened to me many times whenever I’m struggling with a solution, the next morning with little effort the problem becomes really easy.. it has happened countless number of times

That's how bug reports work now. Stall, and the bug report goes away.

Most problems die of old age - AI generated talking dog wisdom on youtube.

Surely you could have found a source for this concept not entirely generated by an LLM?

Call centers that leave people on hold for a minimum of 10 minutes are positively Napoleonic.

The technique can be interpreted in different ways. One thing that definitely helps is when there’s a strong hype cycle, like with AI, where you’re tempted to build the next “super framework” only to realize that another team may develop it faster and better than you ever could.

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.

Some problems solve themselves, and other problems multiply. Knowing the difference is key.

> you could decide to wait a day before replying to emails that ask for your advice on non-urgent issues, if you believe that by then the people who send the emails will likely figure out how to resolve those issues.

... and if you don't care what those people think of you.

That is how Napoleon got defeated in Russia. Russians decided not to engage in battle and let the winter solve the problem for them.

I know a manager who was master of this technique - he did not read any email, nor do anything.

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.

If most of the mail is junk (as in Napoleon's case - an ask is answered No, a missive is answered I Know!, then yes wait or just bin it all.

It would be terrible to be correponding with someone who implements the Napoleon technique, especially when they are your boss and a major bottleneck.

only thing i'd watchout for is the bystander effect when doing this technique.

yeah,, well ... a ticket comes in and you sit on it -- thinking the user can wait will get YOU cut from the team. We win when we all get to the top together -- we languish we some work and others do not. EG The question is the Russians are 40 km from Kiev -- what are your orders? -- fall back was too late.. ? The user have lost connect to the server 90 people are offline -- 8 hours later -- they went home and reboot the server was too late ? you see -- every comms has value and you must act well before it is too late!