(2020-01-21) Lehr Superhuman The Productivity Metalayer

Julian Lehr: Superhuman & the Productivity Meta-Layer. Kevin Kwok posted an excellent article (2019-08-15-KwokTheArcOfCollaboration) a while back about The Arc of Collaboration. The problem, Kevin argues, is that productivity and collaboration shouldn’t be treated separately. Instead, they should go hand in hand and that’s exactly what a lot of the latest productivity tools do: Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc all have messaging natively built in to their apps.

While these functional workflows work great on their own, they are still separate silos between which you have to switch back and forth. The solution might be a meta layer on top of the productivity stack that works horizontally across all function workflows.

It’s not clear yet what exactly this meta layer would look like but it might be something similar to what Discord is to gaming

Instead of Slack, I believe that email – and more importantly Superhuman – will return to become the center of gravity for productivity. (collaborationware)

The way I see it notifications serve three important functions:

• Being notified about (relevant) new developments
• Taking actions on these developments (if necessary) (Universal Toolbox)
• Building a (personalized) history (Second Brain) of company records

You need a single notification stream that allows you to treat notifications like tasks. Slack isn’t that. But you know what is? Email!

While Mailbox eventually got deprecated (after Dropbox acquired it), the emails-as-tasks concept lives on. Snoozing emails and Inbox Zero are now standard features in most email apps.

I’ve always wondered why no one ever developed the idea further: Why stop at snoozing emails? Why not add other actions to your email inbox?

Example A: Your colleague Lisa invites you to a meeting

A right swipe accepts the meeting and adds the event to your calendar: ← A left swipe declines the meeting and lets you propose a different time

The problem with this idea is that you are limited to just a handful of actions (because you can’t fit more on the screen) and that it’s difficult to predict which actions are most relevant for each message you receive. This is where Superhuman comes in.

Superhuman, for those unfamiliar with it, is an email client that – among other features – lets you manage your inbox by just using your keyboard.

Most importantly though, users can trigger a command line interface so you can just write down the action you want to take without having to remember the exact keyboard shortcut. The NLP engine behind this thing works remarkably well and understands what you want to do no matter how you phrase it (this might be Superhuman’s most underrated feature). At the moment, Superhuman commands are limited to typical email actions (snooze, send later, etc), but the obvious next step, in my opinion, is to add commands that work across different apps.

I suspect that Superhuman will build their own calendar features (as well as to-do list functionalities) and then start integrating third-party applications to become an actual platform.

With a strong enough NLP engine behind the command line interface, the possibilities become endless:

Side note: Opening up to 3rd-party developers and thus becoming a platform is also how you build a moat on top of an open standard like email and make the business more defensible.

05 Managing the information firehose

This is where Superhuman’s Split Inbox feature comes in handy. Your main inbox is still reserved for only the most important emails you receive. For everything else you set up dedicated split inboxes

Collecting all notifications in one place has another benefit: Building a (personalized) history of company records. In the current world of multiple inboxes your information is dispersed across a dozen different services and whenever you try looking for something you never know where to find it. This aspect feels like a very underrated benefit of a unified notifications inbox. (search engine)

An actual meta-layer might look closer to something like Tandem, but I could also imagine a Superhuman Command Line that lives outside of the Superhuman app – similar to what Command E are building.