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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sure, but allowing them to take that shortcut can also be taken to encourage them not to think, to prompt them into asking next time as well and deprives them of a learning opportunity. Since memories form best with an emotional connection, a tough debugging session might be a better teacher than your five minutes.
This brings up a related question, though: to what degree are we responsible for colleagues' evolution? For me, there's a lot of grey area between people/competence manager and just being a team player in the true sense.
It can be frustrating, but it's also frustrating if people ask without thinking what this might mean for your own routine. At the end of the day you won't get promoted for not getting your own work done while helping others and people tend to be very inconsiderate if you let them.
At Google one of the early engineers had a handbook on communicating with him, e.g., when to send an e-mail, schedule a meeting, send an instant message. I think this makes sense.
For me for example I think an e-mail should have content (an answer to a question, not a reply that I'll look at it) and I'll reply when I think is appropriate as long as there is no explicit deadline. An instant message might not get a reply at all if it's outside of my time zone or I'm working on something, best to follow up, if an e-mail needs an estimate when to expect a reply, ask for it.
On the other side, I think it makes sense to be as considerate as possible when asking for something, to make sure to get a reply, try not to waste other people's time and try to be as concise as possible.
Edit: one more thing that really helps getting a good reply: if possible tell the recipient what’s in it for them to invest their time.
> at the end of the day you won't get promoted for not getting your own work done while helping others and people tend to be very inconsiderate if you let them.
This depends on the team. I’ve been promoted to manage a team because “we have observed that everyone that has a problem they cannot solve themselves walks over to your desk and you take the time to answer.” Your individual capacity for work may drop, but the teams efficiency can still grow at the same time.
Good point, this is probably my experience at a FANG talking, I was like that early in my career, based on my experience at university where it was mutually beneficial to support others. All things equal I didn't get promoted any faster than the others so I adapted my behaviour. What you experienced is what good management should actually look for, in my case that showed that the team and company goals were strongly misaligned with my personal goals.
Outside of big corporate I've seen more value in helping others, though it still makes sense to evaluate if someone is repeatedly taking up time without returning the favour when the situation arises.
To be clear, I don't think it's good to ignore people, but I think it's important to show boundaries, if someone wants something, they should be considerate and have fair expectations. A well written request considering my situation would very likely get a quick reply.
Exactly this! Many, in particular SW devs, are very concerned with not being interrupted, because it lowers their productivity. But in my opinion, you should optimize for team productivity, not your own productivity. That can for example mean taking 5 minutes to answer a question that they could find out for themselves with a few hours of digging through the code.
> 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.
Different communication styles and the fact that these communication modes are new to humans and we therefore don't have an actual common understanding of netiquette, I guess
I generally only reply when I have a good answer. Which might be 2-3 days later. And I don't sweat chasing people for a follow-up until a couple of days later unless I signified explicitly that it's very urgent to me (unless it's customer service/support kind of thing where they explicitly give expectations otherwise)
If you don't indicate you need this information NOW, why would I drop everything else I'm doing to answer you?
> 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.
I 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.
> my spending five minutes to answer their question might save them an hour of troubleshooting
It's definitely situational, but there's also a "teach a man to fish" effect playing out in some cases.
If it's somebody on my team who will continue to deal with the same class of issues, I'd prefer they "waste" an hour debugging. Chances are I did at some point in the past, and that's why I can answer in 5 minutes.
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.
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.
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.
I'm allergic to it too. There used to be a fantastic add-on which replaced every instance of the word 'cloud' with 'butt'. Very handy a few years ago. Could do with updating for the era of guilt-deflecting advice-meme pollutors.
At the risk of sounding like a trite lifehack peddler, in my experience, finding ways to remove the feeling of guilt is a powerful technique for combatting procrastination and burnout driven by anxiety.
If you have issues coming up with a strategem, just take two random words from the dictionary and add 'technique' to the end and riff off of that!
The Franchise Hospitality Technique. The Dirty Diplomat technique. The Proper Element Technique. The Bee Trustee Technique. The Linger Expansion Technique. The Path Feast Technique. The Brink Intelligence Technique. The Deficit Omission Technique.
Gotta admit, I'm a little tempted to make a humor productivity parody blog using this technique after seeing a few that came up.
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.”
I think the whole thing is a problem. People opining on productivity are creating issues where there are none. And I say this as someone who has tried every productivity strategy under the sun. The only one I have found to work is to just do things until the work day is over. See a task, do a task. Think of something, do something. Get email, reply to email. You can call it inbox zero or eat the frog or Nike Just Do It or whatever other name you want to come up with. But I just do things. Productivity techniques are just structure that get in the way. It can be kind of addictive to design this perfect system for how you are going to organize your work and life - but nothing ever sticks. The only thing that sticks is to just do whatever is in front of you.
It's more a matter of when (in the cycle) than what.
Trends come in booms and busts. Late into the boom, they're usually most devoid of originality. Then they die back. ATM, "productivity hacks" are in the "butt rock" part of the cycle.
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.
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!
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.