from Hacker News

Superhuman and the Productivity Meta-Layer

by julian_digital on 1/17/20, 5:31 PM with 18 comments

  • by joelrunyon on 1/17/20, 6:52 PM

    > 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.

  • by matlin on 1/17/20, 6:31 PM

    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.

  • by robbiemitchell on 1/17/20, 6:17 PM

    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.

  • by thesorrow on 1/17/20, 7:05 PM

    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

  • by babesh on 1/18/20, 5:18 AM

    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.

  • by webmaven on 1/18/20, 1:47 AM

  • by itsevrgrn on 1/18/20, 6:00 AM

    I like the way you designed your website!