Superhuman and the Productivity Meta-Layer | Hacker News Reader

Superhuman and the Productivity Meta-Layer

julian.digital

> But you should also be able to block 30 minutes in your calendar before the meeting so you can prepare – without having to switch over to your calendar app and add the events there. Hit ⌘K and type “Add 30 min buffer before event“. Done.

You should look at https://woven.com - which is doing much of this built into "templates" of events - which you can iterate off with a single click or keyboard shortcut.

I love Superhuman, but the problem with an inbox being the "center of gravity for productivity" is that it's inherently reactive. Real productivity comes from prioritizing your work before it happen - which means that some things are not prioritized. Superhuman might help you be very efficient, action-oriented and get stuff done - but it doesn't necessarily mean you're focused on the right things or getting deep work or creative work done.

Full disclosure: I'm an advisor for the company.

If your job is being reactive and sending e-mails it can be the center of gravity. This is particularly true for investors, executives and sales people.

However, if your job requires you to "build" whether it's code, slides, designs, etc then proactive work planning is essential and turning emails into tasks to be deferred is essential. I think of these as people who teeter between the maker and managers schedule: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Obviously, I'm biased because I build a Daily Planner: Sunsama (https://sunsama.com)

What's funny is that the link within the article "The Arc of Collaboration" is saying basically this. A tool has to be transparent and should not steal your focus from your productivity app.

> Full disclosure: I'm an advisor for the company.

Which company, Superhuman or Woven?

Yes.

Woven: https://angel.co/joelrunyon

Woven

This is spot on for the types of email that are actionable notifications and is absolutely an unmet need that a company like Superhuman could fix if they choose to integrate with third party platforms. The unfortunate part is that there are many emails that fall into the non-actionable notification category. For example:

- "your item has shipped"

- "here is your receipt"

- "this server is at 80% CPU utilization"

These types of notifications still require leaving your email and loading an outside system to get the full view. I am beginning to think that email as central log of activity, communication, and actions needs to treated uniquely for each category. I think Superhuman + your idea covers 2/3 but the remaining category requires something new. I think supporting plugins/apps that can read and summarize these types of emails like how Google does emails regarding flights we could alleviate a lot of the overwhelming nature of triaging an ever-growing inbox.

A lot of these companies want to gather data from you, so they make users click through rather than including all of that in the email itself.

That's definitely true for the big companies with freemium services but I'm optimistic that the services that you pay for or the ones that want to spend less on engineering may find it simpler and aligned with their users to just send the relevant info in completion to your email and make a small plugin to visualize or aggregate it for you. That is of course only possible if this option was available to them...

It sounds like you're describing an _action_ queue where you can act on objects from any system in one place. Even just a bunch of smarter calendar automations (Google, Microsoft) would be a godsend.

That said, a couple things you didn't mention that struck me:

- Slack's "All Unreads" tab which shows you everything in one place, and "Actions" which lets you turn messages into something else. (Neither of which are killer, just pointing them out.)

- The ecosystem of actions you describe is a seemingly infinite slog of development work to get to the point where a user can auth other apps and have these NLP/CLI actions "just work" and be configurable by an average user.

This takes the idea of work being a queue of queues to the extreme: https://amontalenti.com/2019/11/04/work-is-a-queue-of-queues

I can attest that the "infinite slog" thing is at least partially true :P

This is why, incidentally, that in productivity you need to raise surprising amounts of money. (Or grow revenue super fast, if you can. But then you'll raise a surprising amount of money anyway.)

I remember Mozilla having a lab project in 2009 called Raindrop [1].

"Raindrop is a messaging application building on Apache's CouchDB which is used through a web interface. Raindrop works by collecting messages (currently emails and tweets, but more will be available through addons) and storing them as JSON optionally with attachments in CouchDB."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Raindrop

Sounds like what the Baltimore Police Department does with Lotus Notes.

From reading the linked article, I think an interesting thing if people can pull it off is the reorganization of businesses/functions to add value to the system as a whole.

Discord adds value to individual games. Each additional game adds value to Discord. Both add value to users.

It is a model allowing more innovation to come from individual companies instead of domination by a single company providing all productivity tools.

Sounds a lot ike GMail's actions:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/actions/actions-o...

I like the way you designed your website!

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