Be superhuman ;)

I Tried Silicon Valley’s Most Hyped Email Tool — Here is What Superhuman.com is Like

It’s built around focus and speed. But they have two other things that really stand out — and two problems to consider.

I am a productivity geek. For instance, I have switched from the common QWERTY keyboard to the German variant of Dvorak: Neo2. It has a superior key layout inspired by the number of times each key is used and how easy it is to access them. If you didn’t know: QWERTY was designed to move common letter combinations like ‘sh’ in English far apart, because otherwise mechanical typewriters would get their gears locked. After that everyone just kept going.

Anyhow, I was curious when I was recommended Superhuman by a Lunchclub date (another app you should check out if you haven’t).

What’s it like? Well, here is a list of the top 4 features, 3problems, and my conclusion:

1. Focus through simplicity

Once you click on an email (or hit enter on one) all you see is that one email, no other clutter. No menu, no other emails. Pure focus. You then get to go to the next or previous email in your inbox through shortcuts. They claim that you go through your inbox twice as fast — and it is absolutely true. Is this a technical innovation? No, this is super easy to do. I just value the human ingenuity to design it that way. That is the hard problem which they solved.

Super clean interface. On the right, it’s either your calendar or details about the sender.

2. Speed through shortcuts

Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra claims that all interactions within superhuman take less than 100ms. I think they are even down to 60ms. 100ms is the threshold at which loading times are perceptible. This really does make a difference, especially paired with their other speed-feature: shortcuts. You can go through the entire app with shortcuts and since everything is so blazing fast, this does make sense. Gmail in the browser is so slow, you might as well click. But in superhuman, you are the bottleneck, so you better upgrade how you tell the computer what to do ;)

My favorite shortcut is the snooze feature. Most email programs have this, but Superhuman allows natural language. You just hit “h”, type “in 3 days”, hit Enter. That’s it.

Natural language for snoozing. On the right some details about the sender.

Also, Esc works everywhere and for everything.

3. Personal onboarding

I can only recommend all entrepreneurs to try out superhuman for a month (if you know me, I can invite you so you get a month for free). The only way to get to use superhuman is through this process:

1. Apply
2. Schedule onboarding call
3. Get access during onboarding call

They really do take 30 minutes to explain everything to you. What surprised me even more, is they ask you to log into your email account while screen sharing and go through your inbox right away. I was already following the Inbox 0 process, so this was fast, but they will basically show you how to use the tool with all the shortcuts to set up the perfect process for you. Good learning: a lot of the shortcuts work in other email programs, too — so these are some transferable skills.

Application form for superhuman

4. Updates

Superhuman will constantly send you informative and well-designed newsletters with insights on how to use the tool even more effectively. They have even created an 80s style space invaders game to teach you the different shortcuts.

Teaching shortcuts via a game: now you need to press / which is the shortcut for searching

Superhuman Email Blast

Another well-designed feature is that you can extend your free trial by doing certain actions.

Downsides

1. No Android or Windows app. Although the Mac app is just the web app in a frame, so not much to be missed here. Regarding the Android app: you can still use the amazing Gmail app without problems. They are all compatible (thanks to the decentralized magic of email).
2. No shared inbox. They ask if this is important to you in the application form and promise to deliver this at some point. You can, however, add multiple accounts and switch through them with shortcuts.
3. No customization of shortcuts. For those who take productivity seriously and have thus departed from the ancient QWERTY keyboard layout this is a bit of a problem. Some of the shortcuts are easily accessible on QWERTY but not Neo2 or DVORAK. Also they are not positioned as well: Superhuman uses the J and K key for navigation between emails. Those are a good choice on QWERTY but not on better layouts.

Conclusion

Whether or not this makes sense to use long-term depends on how important things like an Android app, and a shared inbox are to you.

In either case, I can only recommend signing up for it to go through the onboarding experience. As mentioned above the keyboard shortcuts are, to a large degree, universal.

Oh, and if you complain about the price of 30$ a month: either you are not the target group, because you don’t write enough emails OR you are irrational about how you spend your money. If this saves you half an hour per month, it’s probably already worth it financially. Likely it’ll save you 30 min per day.