Replicating Superhuman Email Flow in Gmail
A few weeks ago my boss suggested I try an email app called Superhuman, both because of their unusually good onboarding process, but also because we both relay heavily on email.
The onboarding process was great and consists of three steps: An unnecessarily long questionnaire (to provide data and weed out tire kickers), a 1:1 session with a very well trained specialist to get you started and a set of introductory emails to get you cracking with some more advanced features. It's very well designed and particularly the expert session was immensely useful.
After a few days of using Superhuman, I did notice I was being significantly more efficient and systematic in my email handling. I no longer forgot to get back to important email threads which I had read, but needed time to mull things over before replying. I remembered to follow up on things when I asked people something and never got a response. I spent about the same time daily doing email, only now I was getting things done. Still, I couldn't help but to wonder, how much of this effect is the tool and how much the methodology?
The Superhuman method is simple:
Your email box is a to-do list, whenever you open an email, you either
Do something about it (reply),
Postpone it (and set a reminder) or
Get rid of it (archive).
After an email session, your inbox should be empty
Learn keyboard shortcuts for everything and never lift your hands from the keyboard
Create filtered views to help prioritize senders and ensure important stuff doesn't get buried in the endless stream of marketing fluff
To find out how much magic is in the tool, I set out to replicate as much of this workflow as I could with Gmail's standard web client:
Archived all mail older than 1 week from my inbox (I can still find it, but it won't show up when I open my inbox)
Enabled the Auto Advance feature (which opens the next email whenever one is replied to, archived or snoozed)
Turned on keyboard shortcuts
Set the inbox mode to multiple inboxes with Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates boxes enabled
After this, you will need to learn the keyboard shortcuts for key functions, most of which are identical to Superhuman's. Here are the ones you should remember:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#settings/shortcuts
