It's Not Email; Its a Story

What if your inbox was a story, delivered twice a day?

I’m the dude that coined this phrase.

Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die

Below is a very old post I wrote to remind myself how this quote came into existence. I no longer use Superhuman. I’m on Spark (Readdle) with a slew of AI to insulate me from this multi-generational scourge. I wrote about it here.

I love Spark, but I’m almost certain I won’t be able to resist Cora.

What if you could transform your inbox from chaos into a clear story? One that gives you the bottom line, instead of the back and forth.

Unless you’re a litigator or forensic specialist, no one cares much about the turn of each conversation. When faced with the task of distilling a lengthy conversation, I find it annoying and a waste of time. I’d love to have a folder of stories - like a book about each day’s conversations. I hope it delivers on this promise because it could be a significant productivity enhancer as well as an organizational aid.

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Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die

I coined that phrase in 1999 aloft over the South Pacific on my way to Sydney to give a keynote lecture to the Australian Computing Society. The topic - Productivity and Email. Since then, lots of people have re-used this phrase because it remains somewhat accurate more than 30 years later. We've all experienced the scourge of email.

I said then and I'll say it again ... being productive with email is mandatory ... and despite the numerous attempts, email clients are generally not very productive, or at least they don't give us the sense that we are making progress in our work. To the contrary, we often feel the opposite - email is a tsunami that never ends.

Ideally, the best email client would make it feel like email itself has vanished. And as I continue to learn SUPERHUMAN, I am beginning to get that sensation.

Just three days into this experiment, which was highly recommended to me by Stanley Tate, I must admit - this feels pretty good. But I'm being cautious - baby steps. I've seen these claims before and many times. I don't want the euphoria of inbox zero to give me a false sense of [new] success just yet.

Inbox One

A half-decade ago I wrote about a hypothetical email client that only shows you one message - the most important one.

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What if your inbox always showed you just one message? Perhaps the most important message of all. What if after dealing with your one and only inbox item, the email app was smart enough to not show you another one for 60 minutes? How would that change your behaviour with regard to email? Would you panic? Freak out?

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Logically, there can be only one most important message to attend to, right?

Over the past 72 hours, I have repeatedly felt the sensation that SUPERHUMAN was making this possible. I haven't mastered all of the features that can be brought to bear from this well-designed and pleasurable messaging management experience, but I'm beginning to see why this tool is getting vastly more praise than the many historical attempts to solve the email productivity crisis.

Inbox Knowledge

74 trillion email messages were sent last year. That's about 500 million since you started reading this article. Even if a small fraction contains important nuggets of smartness, that's a lot of good knowledge heading to the grave.

Optimistically, I think there's a bigger story that may emerge from SUPERHUMAN and it's likely more AI, more ML, and possibly a reversal of the notion that Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die.