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.
You can defer the decision without waffling on the communication. Saying "we'll decide this later" (ideally with some reasons / parameters), is decisive - and sometimes gets pushback. Going silent in order to avoid dissent is bad form.
Not to say this "technique" isn't useful, but imo it should be super limited. I'll put off a reply when a) it's a non-urgent issue, where b) resources (documentation, or other local users' experience) exist, c) this user will be motivated to find them (by the nature of the issue, or because I know they are the sort of person who does that), and d) independent problem-solving will fulfill a teaching function. Even then, I will hit "Snooze" on the email and follow up a day or two later: if they haven't solved it I'll point them to a resource; if they have I'll praise them for figuring it out for themselves. People like both outcomes.
I notice that many of the historical examples are a result of latency in communication, like people asking for things that had already been done. We don't often face that constraint.
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.
On the one hand I agree, but on the other hand I think it can be useful to examine both sides of ones vices. For instance, by studying delay as a legitimate technique you may come to realize that you have been subconsciously doing this. Just poorly and in the wrong situations. And you can ask yourself when you feel the urge to procrastrinate "is this the right time to delay? are there important things I should wait for before doing this?". And if there is then you can procrastrinate with good conscience and if there isn't then you have an additional argument for doing it now.
Going out on a limb with my speculation, I think it could even remove psychological fuel from the fire. By more clearly knowing when the behavior is and isn't appropriate, it will mean that when it seems inappropriate it will also be inappropriate, so performing the behavior when it seems inappropriate wil not be successful or rewarded or strengthened.
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)
The Napoleon approach is intentional, borne out of belief that a lot of communication is actually meaningless waffle produced by people whose first instict, when faced with an issue, is to talk about it with someone, rather than putting some thought into it; and a lot of it is just people being impatient.
Your thing is just procrastination. Although it can result in similar behaviour, in practice, it's a different thing.
my excessive procrastinating definitely overlaps with this (as I call it in project) meaningless bollocks. and I intentionally let people go on and on, until things stabilize. Endless meetings going around and around, discussing loads but coming up with nothing much
Mostly I put it down to education/ understanding - eg people need around 5-10 repetitions to understand stuff.
To combat this, I modify my documents and diagrams to show how simple things are, make sure all acronyms are explained properly (over and over again) and make 'solutions' into a "story" eg beginning, middle and end explaining how/ why / decisions.
Meaningless bollocks still exist, I let other people run around like headless chickens - I think people like the chaos and fun (well I try and make it fun)
Actually I had some good luck with hiring people that have the minimum marks and huge amount of outside adjacent skills. One example is someone who was running a manufacturing operation on second shift and completing an engineering degree at the same time.
Not specifically the same but there's an adage, "C's get degrees". (I guess it's about how even if you got C's, you're still good enough to have a sheet of paper that even your class topper had?)
I always went with C is for cookie and that's good enough for me. Along with D for diploma.
But note, some schools require a C in prereqs to take further courses. And some schools may put you on academic probation/kick you out if your GPA falls below a C. So D for diploma is a sometimes grade.
This is something I learned from one of my (frankly fairly effective and powerful) parents. My wife, who is super conscientious just thinks its procrastinating, or worse, doing nothing until she does something. From experience in my own family acting like this can seem very selfish because usually if someone brings a problem to your attention they want you to show you are also concerned by acting and solving. Doing nothing can look bad.
But it can be smart! It's not just that problems solve themselves, it's also that the best course of action becomes clear with time. The optics of inaction can be terrible, which is why junior people managing upward nearly always start trying to tackle a problem immediately. For senior people, you need to acknowledge you are aware of a problem and will do something. I think this is one of the reasons managers implement process that seems kind of useless. Like meetings to discuss a decision without making the decision. To participants it can be frustrating but it is a way for the person in charge to show they know a problem exists that also lets them put off doing anything.
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.
I very much agree. Also really miss the ability to quickly group related emails.
(And no, that was not the same as adding a label; for one, the whole group simply appeared as one "bigger" email in the Inbox. It was a bit like a thread that you can manually add emails to.)
When everybody got kicked out of Inbox I happened to have a group of about ten emails related to an upcoming trip. Those ten emails got de-grouped and scattered all around in the ordinary gmail interface. I would have appreciated a smoother transition...
Have you tried Starred Inbox? That turned me from "person who often slips on requests" to "person who rarely ever slips on requests".
Basically, keep your inbox as zero unread. If something should be dealt with it immediately, deal with it immediately. If it needs to wait, Star it. Now, your inbox has a list of all Starred messages at the top. At the start and end of work day, work through Starred items to either tackle them, or keep them Starred for later. But whenever you open your inbox, the starred items are at the top.
With inbox you could have multiple bundles, instead of one "starred" section, and each bundle could have a policy so that after you finished triaging it would automatically be hidden for a day or a week, so that it wouldn't constantly distract you by appearing at the top every time you glance at your inbox. This feature was also never ported to Gmail.
I use Gmail's Snooze feature quite extensively. I've forgotten Inbox's implementation since it's been so long. What did it have that is missing from the Gmail snooze feature?
Gmail also has a built-in "Add to Tasks" but I never use that because it's too confusing for me.
The snooze feature itself was similar. What made it better was the ability to add tasks directly to the inbox and manage them with the same tools as emails, including snoozing. Kind of like sending an email to yourself but with fewer steps and a much nicer UI adding features like the ability to edit them. Also the ability to turn email threads into tasks by adding a quick note to them, to remind you what do do later. It made snoozing a tool you could manage all your tasks with instead of just email threads.
Someone ought to make a Chrome extension that adds this feature back, at least in the web UI. It ought to be doable. Each task would be an email to yourself, and you'd just provide a streamlined UI for creating and managing them. I have half a mind to try it with Claude sometime.
I've built this kind of extension, but the backend being Linear (the issue tracker). I am able to mark an email as an issue, start it, complete it and see details about it, all within Gmail and synced with Linear.
I guess using a local logic should also work - basically having everything inside the browser / extension.
Got an email I can't act on now? Snooze it to when it's the right time and add a note with the reminder.
eg
- grandpa ask to bring a tool: snooze to early Saturday with a note "get him the tool"
- send "GDPR art. 17 account deletion request email" and snooze in 2 months to check account deletion
- recieve invoice due in a month, snooze in a month and write amount reminder in memo
I have a Saved search also that look for memos with text "TODO". Fastmail shows the memo content in the email snippet list, so you can see and process everything at a glance. And you can further filter by labels and more.
Gmail (which I've been using for 22 years) is just crap nowadays. If you can afford Fastmail (and Kagi), switch already. You will regret not to have moved earlier.
Hmm, can you create memos not attached to emails, as standalone tasks that you can edit at any time? Can you connect it to your Gmail address and how is the experience when doing that? Not interested in migrating to a new address.
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 remember part of my new manager training at my company started with "Be a lazy manager". The idea being that you should help your directs build muscles to try to help them self first, and then ask for help.
Be prepared for the “You were never there for me” blame later in their lives. I had the same approach with mine (they were smart kids!) and when they grew up they blamed me for not being there and helping them more. Ce la vie.
Turns out the “correct” answer was to be there to help them cognitively figure it out by helping them ask the right questions. At least that’s what the therapist said. I guess I don’t mind as they both turned out fine. Way better than the trauma I had so I would say it’s a win.
What I imagine here is following a middle path between being too eager to help their kids to the point of doing everything for them, and being unhelpful and absent. Finding that middle path requires prudence and proper engagement, because you have to know when to let the bicycle go and when to hold on.
Helicopter parents tend to fall into the former category, because they stifle their child's maturation and competence by depriving them of the challenges that build confidence and agency. It encourages dependence and self-centeredness. It's criminal and produces a class of people that will pay the salaries of therapists for decades.
The opposite extreme is parental absenteeism which is like a football match without a referee. Someone always influences children - their habits, their worldview, their attitudes - and if a parent isn't doing that, then someone else is, and perhaps not someone who should. Absenteeism is thus a dereliction of parental duty, as parents serve as examples from whom children learn, even more by how they behave and live than by what they say. We are social animals, and a healthy family life produces healthy people.
And by following this middle path well, you also teach your children to be able to be appropriately helpful to others themselves and in this manner, able to discern when help is appropriate and when it is not. Practical reason is central to the ethical life.
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.
I basically have never actively sought out World News, and just find out "through osmosis" by talking to friends or hearing about things coincidentally. Then I go google specific events that interest me. I find that most immediate reporting is unclear anyways, and adding 2-3 months of hindsight generally results in more facts and less speculation. I think this has worked really well for me. If the world goes to shit within 3 months I think I will notice even without reading the news.
I'm not sure if this strategy can generalize to the entire population, since I am relying on my friends to mention events to me.
I guess the counter-argument is that the world is slowly going to shit and it's only by paying attention and getting involved that we can prevent that. But I don't think that justifies daily news reading.
Much news is biased towards specific political PoVs so that if you’re not aligned with those views, it can be frustrating to hear the same opinions, day after day, on matters that should be solved differently.
It takes a lot to move the needle, and I can understand anyone who simply doesn’t have the energy.
And then other folks ignore international law and simply do whatever they want, while others look on or pay the matter only lip-service.
I would argue it makes you a better citizen by not falling prey to the emotional manipulation that all of the news sources blast us with non-stop. There is enough hate and anger in the world and the constant stoking of those flames is doing us no good. And unless you're actually going to take action and do something about it (and I'd argue that posting rants on social media does not qualify), then what is the point of absorbing that anger.
I know people on both sides who have fallen prey to this and are no longer pleasant to be around.
I went for a while without reading any news but my grandmother told me I should always stay informed. I figured she was right so I at least keep abreast of things but don't read too deeply.
I do not read the news either. Reading about all the shit every day just makes me feel down, and I am fully aware of what is going on in the world without actively seeking out the news. Trickle down news is enough.
One is not a bad citizen for not constantly swimming in the depressing narratives. In addition, a lot of news are spun to make you feel as bad as possible, just like social media thrives more the worse you feel.
The news, and with it politics, have largely deteriorated to the point where only a few percent of the highest quality sources are worth any attention. It's all simple narrative grievance and entertainment. NYT in particular has fallen into oblivion resorting to typo clickbait and hate reads. The attention economy has defeated the information economy, with this one weird trick...
My prediction for the New Year is that LLMs won't make it better.
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.
“Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's a day you've had everything to do and you've done it.”
Margaret Thatcher
(To which a clever friend of mine retorted: Because you know you can do nothing the next day)
I really like that one, but look at it in reverse - when faced with a task and wondering whether to do it now or postpone it to tomorrow, ask yourself "When faced with it tomorrow, am I as likely to postpone it again?" if so, I strive to explicitly choose one of the following:
1. Accept that it's just not important to me and consciously abandon it (perhaps with a quick WONTFIX update/handling, if needed).
2. Accepting that it is important and I'm as likely to keep postponing it, roll up my sleeves and do it now.
3. Accepting that it is important, but now is not a good time to tackle it, postpone it, but try to set things up such that I won't postpone it again. This includes blocking off dedicated time in my calendar for the new time, making sure I have the tools/prerequisites I'd need then, and if possible figuring out a motivational hack to prevent myself from postponing it again.
It's still hard, and I'm constantly learning what works for me and what doesn't, but I like that I'm making these choices more mindfully.
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.
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.
I am cross-quoting from N.N. Taleb, forgive my errors, but to me it's something in the line of "If you want to be cured from reading the newspaper, spend a week reading old newspaper."
Housemasters and housemistresses have a better idea of whether pupils are being bullied than parents, because they are physically present and receive reports from classroom teachers, tutors, games coaches, and so on. The 1970s are over and boarding schools are no longer run by rum, sodomy and the lash.
The refusal of many twenty-first century parents to acknowledge that schoolteachers have at least two university degrees and consequently have expertise in their profession is the cause of the issue. If you’re not willing to trust the professional educators and administrative processes at a school, why are you spending the median income on sending your child there?
It can be simultaneously true that 5% of educators are great, 20% very good, 60% are good, 13% are adequate, and 2% should have fired 5 years or more ago.
If you’re in the first three groups, it can be hard to understand the disrespect and vitriol which is overwhelmingly directed at experiences parents have with that last group.
Prestigious boarding schools - the schools that I’ve been writing about - need not bother with teachers outside that top 25%.
Non-selective government schools, like all public services, have inevitably become largely concerned with social work; teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.
> teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.
Or else what? Their union will hold them to account? Their colleagues? Their administration?
I have two kids in such public schools and I can’t think of anything I’d ask of a teacher that would require a same-day response let alone an immediate one.
If I need an immediate response, it’s not likely a topic I should be taking to a teacher in the first place. Their job is to teach, not to monitor for inbound comms from parents.
By 'immediate', I meant same day. But you sound like a reasonable parent; you're writing in the hypothetical. It's the small minority of parents who are constantly in contact with teachers (because most legitimate concerns should be triaged by the school receptionist) and consequently cause the problems - it's no different to any other customer-facing role.
> need not bother with teachers outside that top 25%.
To simply "not bother" with lower-quality teachers sounds like you find it easy, as an institution, to determine teachers' quality. That seems far from a solved problem, for teachers and indeed most employees in general. You can pick a particular metric, of course, but then people will try to game it, and in teaching, there seems to be a lot of room for gaming metrics...
I’m talking about institutions and their internal processes, not some tedious nonsense about how money is intrinsically evil.
Rich people have all sorts of problems. Part of the package in an elite education is that the school has a better capacity to sort those out by itself. Constant communication with parents undermines that.
It’s a question of values and understanding what you’re buying into. These schools don’t suit all parenting styles.
I'm curious what you consider "training", and how this would be different than a vocation-specific university degree? Which typically also includes supervised real-world teaching experience?
Ah, for days of yore, when if the parents wanted to talk to the school, they could… write a letter.
Honestly, I see no small part of the problem here as being that communication is too easy, and it results in a lot of frivolity. Used to be that you had a problem, you figured it out - now you can send an angry WhatsApp message, and because some person hasn’t responded to you within 20 seconds, they are now your problem, and any initiative to figure it out yourself has flown the coop.
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.
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.
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" :-)
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.
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.
Came here to make exact comment. I can't let anything fall through the cracks at my job but I don't necessarily need to be the one handling.
Mondays I will typically have 30-50 of these waiting that sequentially get snoozed 3 hours, tomorrow, next week until resolved or first rights of refusal from others are exhausted and I handle myself :).
It's the same exact workflow I have. I repeatedly snooze 1 hour, 3 hour, next day or next week. These are follow ups that doesn't quite belong anywhere like Jira or other systems.
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'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!
It's a good question. For that day I needed a solution, and when I went to him with a solution of my own he said it was fine. I’ll never know if it was the best solution, but it’s better to go with a solution than to have no solution at all.
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.
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
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".
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
> For example, in a situation where you can strongly benefit from the Napoleon technique, and all the potential negative outcomes are minor and unlikely to occur, you will almost always want to implement this technique. Conversely, in a situation where there is even a moderate likelihood that this technique will lead to serious negative outcomes, you will likely want to avoid using it, even if it has some potential positive outcomes.
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.
increase productivity in invading countries and killing their inhabitants? is there any Attila Method or Pinochet Hack i could complement the Napoleon Technique with?
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.
Not to say this "technique" isn't useful, but imo it should be super limited. I'll put off a reply when a) it's a non-urgent issue, where b) resources (documentation, or other local users' experience) exist, c) this user will be motivated to find them (by the nature of the issue, or because I know they are the sort of person who does that), and d) independent problem-solving will fulfill a teaching function. Even then, I will hit "Snooze" on the email and follow up a day or two later: if they haven't solved it I'll point them to a resource; if they have I'll praise them for figuring it out for themselves. People like both outcomes.
I notice that many of the historical examples are a result of latency in communication, like people asking for things that had already been done. We don't often face that constraint.
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.
It’s a bit like advanced chicken. You’ve gotta be really sure that that 18 wheeler bearing down on you is Not Your Problem.
Going out on a limb with my speculation, I think it could even remove psychological fuel from the fire. By more clearly knowing when the behavior is and isn't appropriate, it will mean that when it seems inappropriate it will also be inappropriate, so performing the behavior when it seems inappropriate wil not be successful or rewarded or strengthened.
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)
The Napoleon approach is intentional, borne out of belief that a lot of communication is actually meaningless waffle produced by people whose first instict, when faced with an issue, is to talk about it with someone, rather than putting some thought into it; and a lot of it is just people being impatient.
Your thing is just procrastination. Although it can result in similar behaviour, in practice, it's a different thing.
my excessive procrastinating definitely overlaps with this (as I call it in project) meaningless bollocks. and I intentionally let people go on and on, until things stabilize. Endless meetings going around and around, discussing loads but coming up with nothing much
Mostly I put it down to education/ understanding - eg people need around 5-10 repetitions to understand stuff.
To combat this, I modify my documents and diagrams to show how simple things are, make sure all acronyms are explained properly (over and over again) and make 'solutions' into a "story" eg beginning, middle and end explaining how/ why / decisions.
Meaningless bollocks still exist, I let other people run around like headless chickens - I think people like the chaos and fun (well I try and make it fun)
(Always enjoy when that construction is actually valid, people often miss the reflexive part)
These days a 3 is no longer a conceded pass, it's a failure that entitles you to re-attempt your final exam.
But note, some schools require a C in prereqs to take further courses. And some schools may put you on academic probation/kick you out if your GPA falls below a C. So D for diploma is a sometimes grade.
"What do you call a student who passed their medical exam with the lowest grade in their year?"
"A doctor"
Related:
https://structuredprocrastination.com
But it can be smart! It's not just that problems solve themselves, it's also that the best course of action becomes clear with time. The optics of inaction can be terrible, which is why junior people managing upward nearly always start trying to tackle a problem immediately. For senior people, you need to acknowledge you are aware of a problem and will do something. I think this is one of the reasons managers implement process that seems kind of useless. Like meetings to discuss a decision without making the decision. To participants it can be frustrating but it is a way for the person in charge to show they know a problem exists that also lets them put off doing anything.
I very much agree. Also really miss the ability to quickly group related emails.
(And no, that was not the same as adding a label; for one, the whole group simply appeared as one "bigger" email in the Inbox. It was a bit like a thread that you can manually add emails to.)
When everybody got kicked out of Inbox I happened to have a group of about ten emails related to an upcoming trip. Those ten emails got de-grouped and scattered all around in the ordinary gmail interface. I would have appreciated a smoother transition...
Basically, keep your inbox as zero unread. If something should be dealt with it immediately, deal with it immediately. If it needs to wait, Star it. Now, your inbox has a list of all Starred messages at the top. At the start and end of work day, work through Starred items to either tackle them, or keep them Starred for later. But whenever you open your inbox, the starred items are at the top.
Gmail also has a built-in "Add to Tasks" but I never use that because it's too confusing for me.
Someone ought to make a Chrome extension that adds this feature back, at least in the web UI. It ought to be doable. Each task would be an email to yourself, and you'd just provide a streamlined UI for creating and managing them. I have half a mind to try it with Claude sometime.
That's the ideal combination. I use it 20x a day.
Got an email I can't act on now? Snooze it to when it's the right time and add a note with the reminder.
eg
- grandpa ask to bring a tool: snooze to early Saturday with a note "get him the tool"
- send "GDPR art. 17 account deletion request email" and snooze in 2 months to check account deletion
- recieve invoice due in a month, snooze in a month and write amount reminder in memo
I have a Saved search also that look for memos with text "TODO". Fastmail shows the memo content in the email snippet list, so you can see and process everything at a glance. And you can further filter by labels and more.
Gmail (which I've been using for 22 years) is just crap nowadays. If you can afford Fastmail (and Kagi), switch already. You will regret not to have moved earlier.
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 remember part of my new manager training at my company started with "Be a lazy manager". The idea being that you should help your directs build muscles to try to help them self first, and then ask for help.
Helicopter parents tend to fall into the former category, because they stifle their child's maturation and competence by depriving them of the challenges that build confidence and agency. It encourages dependence and self-centeredness. It's criminal and produces a class of people that will pay the salaries of therapists for decades.
The opposite extreme is parental absenteeism which is like a football match without a referee. Someone always influences children - their habits, their worldview, their attitudes - and if a parent isn't doing that, then someone else is, and perhaps not someone who should. Absenteeism is thus a dereliction of parental duty, as parents serve as examples from whom children learn, even more by how they behave and live than by what they say. We are social animals, and a healthy family life produces healthy people.
And by following this middle path well, you also teach your children to be able to be appropriately helpful to others themselves and in this manner, able to discern when help is appropriate and when it is not. Practical reason is central to the ethical life.
I'm not sure if this strategy can generalize to the entire population, since I am relying on my friends to mention events to me.
It takes a lot to move the needle, and I can understand anyone who simply doesn’t have the energy.
And then other folks ignore international law and simply do whatever they want, while others look on or pay the matter only lip-service.
I know people on both sides who have fallen prey to this and are no longer pleasant to be around.
One is not a bad citizen for not constantly swimming in the depressing narratives. In addition, a lot of news are spun to make you feel as bad as possible, just like social media thrives more the worse you feel.
My prediction for the New Year is that LLMs won't make it better.
In fact, my stress levels have declined significantly.
It turns out knowing about events that you have no power to influence and do not directly affect you isn't even remotely useful.
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?
- 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.
Margaret Thatcher
(To which a clever friend of mine retorted: Because you know you can do nothing the next day)
1. Accept that it's just not important to me and consciously abandon it (perhaps with a quick WONTFIX update/handling, if needed).
2. Accepting that it is important and I'm as likely to keep postponing it, roll up my sleeves and do it now.
3. Accepting that it is important, but now is not a good time to tackle it, postpone it, but try to set things up such that I won't postpone it again. This includes blocking off dedicated time in my calendar for the new time, making sure I have the tools/prerequisites I'd need then, and if possible figuring out a motivational hack to prevent myself from postponing it again.
It's still hard, and I'm constantly learning what works for me and what doesn't, but I like that I'm making these choices more mindfully.
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.
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'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017175
But I couldn't say how many people it cured of reading the news so far.
After two weeks: it solved itself, he committed suicide.
The refusal of many twenty-first century parents to acknowledge that schoolteachers have at least two university degrees and consequently have expertise in their profession is the cause of the issue. If you’re not willing to trust the professional educators and administrative processes at a school, why are you spending the median income on sending your child there?
If you’re in the first three groups, it can be hard to understand the disrespect and vitriol which is overwhelmingly directed at experiences parents have with that last group.
Non-selective government schools, like all public services, have inevitably become largely concerned with social work; teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.
Or else what? Their union will hold them to account? Their colleagues? Their administration?
I have two kids in such public schools and I can’t think of anything I’d ask of a teacher that would require a same-day response let alone an immediate one.
If I need an immediate response, it’s not likely a topic I should be taking to a teacher in the first place. Their job is to teach, not to monitor for inbound comms from parents.
To simply "not bother" with lower-quality teachers sounds like you find it easy, as an institution, to determine teachers' quality. That seems far from a solved problem, for teachers and indeed most employees in general. You can pick a particular metric, of course, but then people will try to game it, and in teaching, there seems to be a lot of room for gaming metrics...
After all rich people and their rich kids never do anything wrong /s
Rich people have all sorts of problems. Part of the package in an elite education is that the school has a better capacity to sort those out by itself. Constant communication with parents undermines that.
It’s a question of values and understanding what you’re buying into. These schools don’t suit all parenting styles.
Utter fallacy. Expertise in teaching requires training, experience and/or natural talent.
Honestly, I see no small part of the problem here as being that communication is too easy, and it results in a lot of frivolity. Used to be that you had a problem, you figured it out - now you can send an angry WhatsApp message, and because some person hasn’t responded to you within 20 seconds, they are now your problem, and any initiative to figure it out yourself has flown the coop.
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.
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 forget the source of that, but it makes me chuckle.
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.
Mondays I will typically have 30-50 of these waiting that sequentially get snoozed 3 hours, tomorrow, next week until resolved or first rights of refusal from others are exhausted and I handle myself :).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...
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.
* 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.
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.
Everything will suddenly become "URGENT" then.
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.
... and if you don't care what those people think of you.
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 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.