236. Tech Tools: Zeroing in on Your Email Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: This Tech Tools miniseries is brought to you by Prezi, the presentation tool that makes your ideas easy to follow, hard to forget, and faster than ever to create with Prezi AI. The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade. At Think Fast Talk Smart, we are taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous US inventor and founding father, very seriously. As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and improve your communication and careers. These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology. I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Tech Tools miniseries of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. In this multi-part miniseries, we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fasts Talk Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication. And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them. Taken together, we hope these communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart. I'm super excited today to speak with Rahul Vohra, who is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. Rahul, welcome. Thanks for joining me. I'm excited for our conversation.

[00:01:16] Rahul Vohra: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, and good to see you again.

[00:01:18] Matt Abrahams: I know you're a big proponent of Inbox Zero. For those who don't know what that is, can you share what is the Inbox Zero philosophy and why are you so fond of it?

[00:01:28] Rahul Vohra: Inbox Zero is the idea that you should regularly, let's say once per day, get to the point where there are no emails left in your inbox, and the benefits of doing so are huge. Number one, if you've gone through everything in your inbox, you have no anxiety about what dangers or horrors might lurk beneath. If you come across anything that's on fire or which is particularly important, then number two, you are now empowered to actually deal with it. And number three, it saves you quite a lot of time because you avoid the trap of constantly peeking into emails and then marking them as unread. Now, I realize that a lot of folks listening might be thinking, boy, that sounds great, but I just get too much email or, gee, I can't do that.

[00:02:10] So I'll share just three of the ways that Inbox Zero can be made so much easier and which Superhuman in particular can help you do so. So number one, use Superhuman to split your inbox. I actually get an email every six to ten seconds. It's completely nuts. And what that means is the urgent buries the important. We don't reply to our team. We miss emails from our VIPs, and we don't see important notifications from tools like Notion or Figma or Google Docs, whatever it is you're running your business on. Now, with split inbox, you can actually create separate inboxes for your team, your VIPs, your most used tools, or anything else.

[00:02:47] So even when your inboxes overflowing, you can still hit Inbox Zero where it masses most. So that's number one, split inbox. Number two, don't mark as unread, archive instead. There are two ways of organizing an inbox. You can let your inbox grow infinitely and treat all of the unread emails as the list of things to do, or you can archive emails when they're done and see the inbox itself as the list of things to do, and it turns out to be way faster to do the latter. If unread emails are your to-do list, that's the old fashioned way, you then have to meticulously maintain the unread status. Let's say you receive an intriguing email, you can't help but open it. Now you have to mark it as unread. But wait, there's one more thing you want to check. So you open it again, and then once again you have to mark it as unread.

[00:03:36] If your inbox itself is your to-do list, you avoid this weird, archaic ritual because you simply archive emails when they're done, they disappear from your inbox and they're easily found by a search. All you see are the list of things yet to do, and the end of the list is plainly in sight because you're staying on top of it. And then number three, if you can't do it today, snooze it to when you can do it. You don't need to look at the whole list every day or even tomorrow. Some things you can look at in a few days and other things you can look at in a few weeks. So instead of carrying the full list of things to do in your inbox, which is as crazy as carrying all of your material possessions in your backpack, simply snooze them to when they should come back. So those are the three ways to hit inbox zero and why you should do it. 

[00:04:19] Matt Abrahams: I experience a lot of inbox anxiety and knowing I have a lot in my inbox, wondering what's in there, the approaches you've just mentioned, Inbox Zero, have really fundamentally changed my life. I use snooze all the time. I prioritize when I wanna see them again. I archive versus carry them around. Psychologically, I am a better person. I feel it, and those around me feel it. I encourage everybody to try it. You can experiment with it and see. Some of our listeners might not know what superhuman is. Can you share what your product does using the elevator pitch structure that I teach my MBA students, so it's finishing these sentences, what if you could, so that, for example, and that's not all. 

[00:05:01] Rahul Vohra: Of course, and by the way, I love the structure. As soon as I saw it, I immediately shared it with my team. I was so proud of what I'd written for this podcast. So I think we'll be using it internally from now on. But here we go. What if you could get through your inbox twice as fast as before, follow up on time every time, and respond faster to the things that really matter, so that you never drop the ball? You'd never miss great opportunities and you save four hours or more every single week. For example, our customers split their inbox into the streams of work that matter most, so they can immediately focus on what needs their attention. And that's not all. We're reinventing the future of productivity with AI. Imagine waking up to an inbox where every email already has a draft reply. You would simply edit, then send. Sometimes you wouldn't even edit.

[00:05:50] Matt Abrahams: Can you share what led you to go down this path of creating Superhuman?

[00:05:54] Rahul Vohra: When I started Superhuman, I wanted to solve the biggest possible problem, and email is a way bigger problem than most people actually realize. It hit me just after I sold my last company, which was called Reportive to LinkedIn. I was commuting from work, which was in Mountain View at the time to where I lived in San Francisco. It's about one hour, but this was 2014, and both Uber and Lyft were having their heyday. So I was in the back of the Uber. On this trip, I finished some documents. I cleared out my email. I checked my calendar for tomorrow. I made dinner reservations for that evening. I even called my mother. I was simultaneously being a productive employee, a proactive boyfriend, and a present son. And I realized that the real magic of Uber or Lyft was not commuting. It was not about getting from A to B. It was about time, being able to do other things. So I asked myself the question, where do we spend all of our time? And Matt, I'm gonna ask you a question. Can you guess the one thing that professionals spend the most time doing, and I warn you in advance, this is a trick question.

[00:07:00] Matt Abrahams: Well, so I was going to say email, but I guess my second bet would be being in meetings. 

[00:07:05] Rahul Vohra: Close and close. It is actually sleep, it is sleeping, and I have no idea how to fix sleep. But after sleep, it is of course email. And in fact, there are roughly one billion professionals in the world, and on average we spend three hours a day reading and writing email. So that's three billion hours every single day or north of one trillion hours every single year. 

[00:07:26] Matt Abrahams: So what drove you to this was your own realization about your time usage and how you could help others with theirs, and it has certainly helped me in my time. Before we end, I'd like to ask you two questions that I'm asking everybody who's part of this miniseries. Are you ready for that?

[00:07:41] Rahul Vohra: I'm ready.

[00:07:41] Matt Abrahams: So number one, I'd love to know who is a communicator you admire and why? 

[00:07:47] Rahul Vohra: I really admire Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator and in particular, I love his writing style. It is clear, it is concise, it is persuasive, it is all the things I aim for when I write. And I think it was about five maybe seven years ago, I actually saw a video of him writing. There was a particular YC startup and their whole shtick was, what if you could see other people writing? This was before Google Docs, and it was eyeopening. He wrote every single sentence at least a dozen times. Some he wrote two or three dozen times. And as a designer, as a craftsperson, that really spoke to me, and it is exactly how I teach people to write at Superhuman. We as a company, we take our writing very seriously. Now, fortunately, he's codified all of his rules in a very short essay that he published way back in 2005. If folks are interested to check that out, it is called Writing, Briefly. Writing, Briefly.

[00:08:44] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that reference. The ability to capture ideas concisely and clearly is an art, and one that you need to work on as you've shared. Question number two, beyond your tool and some of the ideas that you've shared with us, is there one hack or shortcut that you use that helps you? So I'll share one just to give you an idea. I find that when I play music and I need to really do some intense focus, having the music play helps me focus more. Something in that vein that you use? 

[00:09:12] Rahul Vohra: I would say the single practice that has had the biggest impact on my own productivity, my own communication is meditation and specifically transcendental meditation. In fact, before we jumped on to record this podcast, I spent precisely twenty-three minutes as it was, twenty minutes in the meditation itself, and three minutes of physical relaxation afterwards to get ready. I now practice transcendental meditation twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And I'm excited to share that it's really been life changing. Initially, I simply felt happier, and then later the effects became more profound. I'm now more creative. I can stay focused for much longer, and I'm much calmer and clearer when I am communicating in a very intentional way. 

[00:10:00] Matt Abrahams: As somebody who also practices meditation, I can espouse how it absolutely helps you focus, gives you energy, and really can reinvigorate you not just in the short term but over in the long term. I appreciate you sharing that. Rahul, this has been fantastic. I want to give you a thank you for sharing insights beyond the tool that you provide. So thank you for that. And thank you for your time.

[00:10:22] Rahul Vohra: Of course. Thank you for having me.

[00:10:26] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for one of our Communication Tools episodes of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Please be sure to listen to all of the episodes in this miniseries. We appreciate Prezi's sponsorship of these episodes. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram, and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.