Napoleon's letters reveal a mind built for relentless multitasking

Roberts leans heavily on the newly available correspondence to show that Napoleon ran an empire the way a founder runs a startup under siege: dozens of urgent threads at once, dictated in rapid bursts to a rotating cast of secretaries. In a single sitting he might order boots for a regiment, adjudicate a property dispute in Italy, and pen a jealous letter to Josephine. This wasn't scattered attention — it was a trained capacity to compartmentalize completely, closing one mental file before opening the next. Roberts argues this skill, more than any single tactical innovation, explains how one person could simultaneously wage war, rewrite civil law, and manage a sprawling bureaucracy without the machinery collapsing under its own weight. Takeaway: extreme output at the top often comes down to a disciplined ability to fully switch contexts, not superhuman stamina.