[JSTucker]

> The company claims its users send and respond to 72% more emails per hour, and the percentage of emails composed with its AI tools has increased fivefold in the past year.

Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?

[Aurornis]

Anecdotally: The Superhuman users I've worked with start skimming e-mails and sending super-short replies. Sending a "Good job team" or questioning something in sentence 2 that would have been answered if they read all the way to sentence 5 of the e-mail is the way to clear their inbox.

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.

[cryzinger]

This old-ish Newport essay comes to mind:

> 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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[cryzinger]

That's also very true. Most of the people I've interacted with who communicate that way (the "one question per email" thing hits painfully close to home, lol) seem very... maybe "oblivious" is a polite way to say it. I guess I never questioned whether their inbox-speedrunning is why they're so oblivious vs. whether it takes an oblivious kind of person to think that's an effective way to conduct your comms :P

[Vegenoid]

“Increased volume of email” sounds like something people would pay to avoid.

[rchaud]

That's how companies like Slack get billion-dollar valuations. The promise of "less".

[pchristensen]

There are many people whose job revolves around churning through emails (sales leads, recruiters, etc). This is a huge win for them.

[cik]

I find this particularly fascinating, given the post email world I live in now. I haven't had an email from a contact in over two years. It sounds like a sales tool, in a world where the goal is to distance from that availability.

[saaaaaam]

Was this “post email world” a choice or something that happened? How do you communicate rather than by email now?

[cik]

In my country, e-mail is now used purely as a sales tool. Notifications from government and schools are also delivered via SMS, and either WhatsApp or Telegram. So.. yeah, block everyone.

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.

[benhurmarcel]

You're talking about personal email, they're talking about professional email.

[cik]

Please do not assume that professional email is used differently. Plenty of companies here simply black hole inbound email unless it's from the same domain or known applications. Frankly, it's refreshing.

[chii]

> percentage of emails composed with its AI tools has increased fivefold in the past year.

read: spam has increased 5 fold!

[mattcantstop]

I think Superhuman's CEO in an interview said their product is specifically catered to people who are seeking inbox zero.

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.

[mrweasel]

A better metric would be: How frequently does the recipients of those emails need to reach out for clarification. The goal of any writing should be to increase clarity and ensure that your message is clearly received.

Why do their customers even need to send 72% more email?

[apparent]

Yeah, if they could increase the quantity without affecting the quality (or improving it), that would be great. But there's a good chance that is not what's happening.

[slightwinder]

Why? The amount of work won't shrink just because you can execute each task faster.