Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?
The inbox->outbox flow turns into the way to clear the inbox. It's not about better communication, it's about speedrunning their way to inbox zero.
The worst case was a person who would respond to everything with a one-sentence question, then respond to the response with another one-sentence question, and repeat all day long. He could turn a brief e-mail into a thread with 15 one-line responses that could have been avoided by spending more than 10 seconds thinking about it.
> The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem. A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else; meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work, creating frustration.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise...
I'm hesitant to call the email-skimming workflow that you mentioned a "reasonable decision," but I think the point still stands about how one person speedrunning their inbox can make everyone else's inboxes that much worse.
I think you're looking a little too strictly through that Cal Newport quote.
There's another big problem that isn't external: The people who speedrun their e-mail like this (which isn't every Superhuman user, to be fair) are also harming their own understanding of those e-mails.
From what I've seen in a few people, it turns into a false sense of being productive while they self-sabotage their own communications. Inbox Zero becomes the goal and they think their job is done when those e-mails are all gone.
Turns out the second you do this you eliminate 100% of the spam in your life. Honestly, if I ever lived in North America again, I think I'd also just stop reading e-mail.
read: spam has increased 5 fold!
For those people this would be a great outcome. The question is should this be the goal of most people? Probably not. But most people are not their ideal customer. They explained their ideal customer in depth in an episode of the Acquired Podcast.
Why do their customers even need to send 72% more email?