The Napoleon Technique: Postponing Things to Increase Productivity
effectiviology.com
effectiviology.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The premise is that your time is way more valuable than somebody else's. And they're wasting it.
Other people learning new stuff is not a waste of time.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398077
"Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company."
This forum is a bit strange at times since it feels like it's trying to make you a good worker bee rather than a good hacker.
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.
But beyond that, I agree.
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.
More specific topics? More credibility?
“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.”
Presumably this was implicit cultural knowledge in the pre-modern era, as the self-help productivity genre is a recent phenomenon.
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.
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.
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!
"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."
I guess my point is; it makes for bad customer service to not communicate.
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.
It seems like whether you leave for an hour or a month, you'll have more or less the same number of notifications.
If I responded immediately people never figured stuff out.
I pushed it too far and the CEO threw a temper tantrum in my doorway.
Only use this technique on lower staff levels. :)
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.
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.
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.
It was a very effective solution for many kinds of problems.