Napoleon was perhaps one of the most successful political and military leaders of all time. Of course he made some bad decisions, and you may or may not agree with this ambition but you certainly cannot deny his effectiveness. He had a technique for dealing with problems, that we can perhaps learn from. It is called the Napoleon technique. You can look it up, lots of people have written on this topic. It is particularly important for our modern age with all the distractions with have to deal with all the time. One of the reasons he was successful was his incredible focus on his ambition, his goal. He let nothing sway him and in so doing achieved rapid success. He died at 51 years of age, pretty young for a person that established himself as a household name and one of most recognized people ever to be born.
His technique was to ignore incoming mail for 3 days. If he got correspondence, he would ignore it for 3 days and then open it then. If the communication was still important then and had not resolved itself then he would go ahead and deal with it at that time. He determined that most problems brought to him, would resolve themselves and require no distraction from him.
Now is this a good technique? I think it could be, if implemented properly. We should not use this technique as an excuse to procrastinate requirements or responsibility for instance. Imagine this. You only process any inbound communications, email, text messages, snail mail, whatever, only after 3 days. Now that may sound crazy, but think about it. How many things would no longer require your attention after 3 days? Quite a bit I imagine. You could actually choose to not look at communication, until one specific time during the week. For example, I only read email on Tuesdays and Fridays. What would that do? How much time would you free up?
Guy Reams
