The Napoleon technique is a productivity strategy where you deliberately delay responding to non-urgent requests, letting time filter out problems that resolve themselves.
Napoleon’s forgotten trick for getting more done by doing less
The average office worker receives 121 emails a day and spends roughly 28% of their workweek just reading and responding to them, according to McKinsey research. That’s more than 11 hours every single week, buried in your inbox. And here’s the kicker: only about 38% of those emails are relevant enough to need a response, based on data from SaneBox’s analysis of inbox content.
So what if you just… didn’t respond to all of them right away?
That’s the core idea behind the Napoleon technique, and it might be the oldest productivity trick that most people have never heard of.
Napoleon’s 3-week rule
The story goes like this. When Napoleon was serving as General in Italy, he told his secretary Bourrienne to leave all incoming letters unopened for three weeks. The only exception? Letters delivered by extraordinary couriers, which signaled genuine urgency.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Representative Men” (1850):
“He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an answer.”
Think about that for a second. The man running military campaigns across Europe found that the vast majority of his “urgent” mail resolved itself if he simply waited.
Bourrienne’s own memoirs paint an even more vivid picture. After the three-week experiment, four-fifths of the letters needed no reply at all. Some had already been answered by other means. Others contained requests for things that had already been granted. Many complained about provisions and pay, but orders had already been issued on those points before Napoleon even cracked the seal.
Napoleon wasn’t being lazy. He was being strategic about where he spent his attention.
Why most of your inbox doesn’t need you
The Napoleon technique, stripped of its 19th-century military context, comes down to this: if something is likely to resolve itself without your direct input, wait before spending your time and energy on it.
This works because of how modern workplaces function. People fire off emails the moment a question pops into their head. They CC you on threads where your input isn’t needed. They ask for guidance on things they’ll figure out in 20 minutes. A study by UC Irvine and the U.S. Army found that constant email access significantly raises stress levels, partly because it creates a false sense of urgency around messages that aren’t urgent at all.
Every email you receive presents a micro-decision: respond now, respond later, or ignore? That decision, repeated 121 times a day, drains mental energy whether you realize it or not. Research on decision fatigue shows that the quality of our choices declines as we face more and more of them throughout the day. Social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, who first documented this phenomenon, found it affects everything from parole decisions to purchasing behavior.
The Napoleon technique cuts through that noise. By deliberately pausing before responding to non-urgent requests, you let time do the filtering for you.
3 ways this works beyond email
The technique isn’t limited to your inbox. Here are some areas where strategic delay pays off.
The line between strategy and avoidance
Here’s where the Napoleon technique gets tricky. There’s a real difference between strategic postponement and sticking your head in the sand.
Psychologists call this second behavior the ostrich effect, a term coined by Israeli economists Dan Galai and Orly Sade. Their research, along with later work by Karlsson, Loewenstein, and Seppi (2009), showed that people are significantly less likely to check on their investments when markets are tanking. They avoid information because it makes them uncomfortable, even when ignoring it makes the situation worse.
The Napoleon technique is not the ostrich effect. Strategic postponement means you’ve made a conscious assessment: this problem will probably resolve itself, and the risk of waiting is low. The ostrich effect means you’re avoiding something because you don’t want to deal with the emotional discomfort of facing it.
Ask yourself two questions before applying this technique:
If the answer is number two, you’re procrastinating, not using the Napoleon technique.
How to put this into practice
You don’t need to go full Napoleon and ignore your mail for three weeks. That would get you fired in most modern workplaces. But you can adapt the principle with a few simple rules.
Set a waiting period for non-urgent messages. Try 24 hours for most internal emails that aren’t time-sensitive. You’ll be surprised how many resolve themselves overnight. One of the insights from Bourrienne’s memoirs is that the value of the technique scaled with the waiting period, but even a short delay had a meaningful impact.
Create a triage system. Not every message deserves the same response time. Emails from clients with active deadlines? Answer quickly. An email from a colleague asking if you’ve seen the new office snack selection? That can wait. Or never be answered at all.
Let people self-identify urgency. Tell your team that if something genuinely can’t wait, they should mark it clearly (a subject line flag, a Slack message, a phone call). Everything else follows your standard response window. This puts the burden of urgency assessment where it belongs: on the person making the request.
Batch your responses. Instead of checking email throughout the day (the average employee does this 11 to 36 times per hour, according to workplace studies), set two or three dedicated windows for email. Between those windows, your inbox stays closed. This is the Napoleon technique applied in miniature: during each batch, you’ll find that some messages have already been resolved by the time you read them.
Don’t make it all or nothing. The technique works best when you apply it selectively. Not every email can wait. Not every problem resolves itself. The skill is learning to distinguish between the four-fifths of messages that will sort themselves out and the one-fifth that need your attention right now.
Watch out for Parkinson’s Law
One more pitfall worth flagging. Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you give yourself three days to respond to every email, you might find that email responses that used to take two minutes now take ten, because you’ve given yourself permission to spread out.
The Napoleon technique works when you use the saved time for something more valuable. If the time you reclaim from not answering unnecessary emails just gets filled with other low-value busywork, you’ve missed the point. The goal is to redirect your energy toward the work that actually moves things forward.
Konklusjon
What makes this technique worth trying isn’t the productivity gain alone. It’s the shift in mindset.
Most of us operate with an unspoken assumption that every incoming request deserves an immediate response. We treat our inboxes like obligation machines. Every notification becomes a tiny debt we feel compelled to pay off.
Napoleon, running an entire military campaign, looked at his pile of correspondence and thought: most of this will sort itself out. And he was right. Four out of five letters needed nothing from him.
Your inbox is no different. The question isn’t whether you can afford to wait. It’s whether you can afford not to.
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