Rahul Vohra’s Productivity Playbook

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I'm Sarah Lynch, and you are listening to Your Next Move. Audio Edition produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. On today's episode, host Ayesha Bho talks with Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman. Designed to integrate seamlessly with Gmail and Outlook, Superhuman uses features like AI summarization and split inbox to create the fastest email experience ever made. In their conversation, they explore how important time management is for founders and how the speed of progress at a company usually boils down to how much time the founder has to spend on what really matters instead of pointless busywork. But before we get to that interview, I talked with Ami Videk, Vice President of Credit Card, Business Cards, and Payments at Capital One. She shared more insight into how digital tools can help founders manage their time as effectively as possible to grow their businesses. Ami, thank you for being here today. Thanks so much, Sarah. I'm so glad to be here. What are some ways that founders can minimize the time-consuming tasks that get in the way of using their time to grow their businesses? Well, one of the best ways you can do that is to take an inventory of all of your processes and see where there are issues. Some clues that you can improve a process include anything that requires duplicate or a lot of manual work, which can introduce errors. Anything that becomes a bottleneck where projects get delayed, they take longer than expected or affect deadlines, or if a process is generally inefficient and not using the best technology. Basically, if you or your team are left thinking there's got to be a better way, there often is. So once you identify ways to save time, how do you go about actually making them more efficient? Well, there are a lot of ways you can improve your productivity. One of the ways I've improved my own productivity is by adopting digital tools designed to streamline processes. According to research conducted by our Capital One Insights Center, 90% of business owners said that digital tools help them run their businesses more efficiently. Another 90% said that digital tools help them find clients, and 86% said that digital tools help them survive the past 4 years. Let's talk about some specific ways that digital tools can make a difference. Absolutely. There are a lot of ways that digital tools can make a difference for you and your business. Some digital tools can automate simple daily tasks like meetings, making recurring payments, writing welcome and post-purchase emails. You can also use automation to streamline customer-related processes like planning email marketing campaigns, scheduling social media posts, or using chatbots to answer basic or common questions from your customers. Integrating digital tools into your business operations can also help you run your business by consolidating your data into one hub, eliminating silos, and letting departments like finance, HR, sales, and others easily interact and share data as you scale your business. And don't forget that choosing partners that have well-developed digital tools can also save a lot of precious time. For example, your Capital One Business account lets you manage users, schedule payments, integrate expense management software, and much more. Ami, thank you for being with us and sharing these insights about how digital tools can improve productivity. Thanks, Sarah. It was so great being here with you today.

I'm so excited to be here with you today at the Superhuman offices.

Thank you for being here.

I'm really looking forward to learning more about something that I think that founders strive to accomplish, which is optimizing productivity.

There's a lot that we can get into.

So I want to kind of start at the beginning. Can you tell me a little bit about your company, Superhuman?

Absolutely. Superhuman is a revolutionary AI email reimagined for teams. You can get through your inbox twice as fast as before, reply 1 to 2 days sooner, and save 4 hours or more every single week. You can also collaborate way more effectively. So instead of repeatedly forwarding and BCCing and taking screenshots and pasting the screenshots into Slack, you can actually share, comment, and collaborate right from your inbox.

Take me back to the beginning. What was the motivation? Why did you decide to start Superhuman?

I wanted to solve the biggest possible problem, and email is a way bigger problem than most people even realize. It turns out there are 1 billion professionals in the world, and on average, we spend 3 hours a day reading and writing email. That's 3 billion hours every single day, or north of a trillion hours every single year. It's actually really hard to find something that people spend more time on than email. After a bit of searching, I did find something. It turns out we spend more time sleeping than we do on email, but I couldn't figure out how to improve sleep. So email it is. We set out to build a revolutionary email experience so you can get through your inbox twice as fast as before, so you can respond faster to the things that matter, so you can follow up on time every time, reply with brilliant timing, and like I said, collaborate much more effectively. Ultimately, we want to eliminate email anxiety once and for all.

How'd you come up with the idea?

Gosh, well, I remember being in Mountain View. We were talking about Mountain View earlier, commuting back to San Francisco. And for those that don't know, that's roughly a 1-hour drive. I had just sold my previous company to LinkedIn, and this was the heyday of Uber and Lyft, and I happened to be in the back of a car instead of driving. And because of this, I was able to finish a product document, send out a bunch of emails, get to inbox zero, sort my calendar, phone my mom, make a reservation for my partner, all on the ride home. I was genuinely a better human being. And I thought to myself, huh, this Uber company, this isn't about getting from A to B. This isn't a transportation company. This is about getting back time. And so when I was looking for my next venture, when I was thinking, what am I going to build next? I started analyzing where people spend their time. Sleep, then email.

Since that day, can you share a little bit more about how Superhuman has grown?

Well, that was 2014. And like any other company, we started with just one person, me. And it was me for about a year from the summer of 2014 to the summer of 2015. Around that time, I brought on board 2 co-founders and our founding engineer. By the end of that year, we were perhaps 5 or 6 people, and today we're hovering around 110 people.

One of the things that you just said that I resonate with really strongly was a couple years ago, I stopped driving, and all my friends were like, why? Don't you want to drive? Don't you miss the freedom? And I said no, because I get so much more done when I'm riding than when I'm driving. I wanted that time back in my day. As your company has evolved from you to 100+ people, how do you determine where you spend your time versus what you delegate other people to do?

I think the role of the CEO is, and this is frustratingly general advice, but it is important, is to always do the most important thing, to always be solving the biggest problem. And today what I do is very different to what I did in those early days. In fact, I would say my job seems to change almost every 6 months. Today, what I do is spend more than 60 or 70% of my time on the craft of product and design and marketing and teaching the next generation of product managers, designers, and marketers how to do that at a world-class level here at Superhuman. And then with the rest of the time, I do media work like this. I do partnerships and of course internal meetings.

How did you arrive at that combination? It seems as though you very concisely settled on, I do this, I do this, I do that.

There are so many rules of thumb in business. For example, one rule of thumb that I used to believe in is, let's say, as a Series B funded founder, you should spend 30% of your time on recruiting. But is that really a good idea? What if you're really bad at recruiting? Do you just grind at it in the hope that one day you get good? That can be a lifelong journey and you may never get there. Or should you bring on board somebody who's already excellent at it and can help you recruit today so you can focus on what you're world-class at? I believe in this idea of zone of genius that we should all, in a startup especially, spend our time working on the things we are genuinely world-class at. Now, it's a luxury we don't always have. Sometimes the things that are most important aren't the things we're world-class at doing. But that's the art of being a founder, is continually building, triaging, and creating leverage so you and everybody else in the company can work on the things that you're world-class at.

I struggled with this early on. I would say when we were between 1 and 10 people, I was doing a lot of things. That I was not necessarily good at. What would you say maybe is like the magic number when you can really get clarity on your zone of genius and decide to stay in there and operate in there?

Well, hopefully you can get clarity on what your zone of genius is relatively early. Maybe you're coming out of a previous venture or previous work or a hobby has grown up and you know that maybe you're fantastic at design or perhaps you're just wonderful with operations. And I would say it can start even as early as those 10 people. For example, it was me for a year. When we brought on those two co-founders, I very specifically chose them in order to reflect what I was good at and what I was not good at. One of the co-founders, classically as a technology company, was a chief technology officer. His name is Konrad. He's one of the best programmers you'll ever meet, wonderful human being, and Whilst I can program, I'm not particularly great at it. I wouldn't say I'm world-class. He's genuinely one of the best in the world. Going back to this idea of recruiting, I'm not very good at it. My talents lie elsewhere, but we all know, we've all read that one of the most important things you can do when building a company is to hire a world-class team. So how do you do that? Well, you bring on board someone who has already built a world-class team. At their previous company. And I did that. And Vivek, who was this recruiting co-founder and this operations co-founder, helped build the early team at Superhuman.

I was going to show you I have 99,281 emails that have not been read in my phone and maybe a couple hundred phone calls, voicemails. And it wasn't until I started using Superhuman that I realized there's sort of all these ways that I could be actually working this inbox better. For those who may be unfamiliar with Superhuman, can you share a little bit about what makes it so special?

There's a tremendous amount. So we can start with the actual email workflow. And then if you're interested, we can talk more about some of our recent developments, both with AI and collaboration. But first, let's just talk about email in general. I think folks everywhere are struggling with this. And even if you don't use Superhuman, these tips can be helpful. So number 1, trash your folders, trash your labels. A lot of people, myself included, I did this earlier in my career. Would meticulously file every single email they get into a label or into a folder. And it turns out that this is wasting a vast amount of time. So just don't do it. It's much faster to find an email via search than it is to pre-filter them all into a folder or a label. So that alone can save you an hour a week. The second thing I would say is, and I know you're a fan of these, use the keyboard shortcuts. Let's assume you work an 8-hour day. If you use keyboard shortcuts in all of your software, it turns out you'll save 134 hours every single year. That's 17 workdays back every single year. The third thing I would say is archive your backlog. You've talked about having tens of thousands, I think 90-plus thousand unread emails.

Yeah, I'm a serial email non-opener. I have about 99,000 emails that I have not opened over the last decade since I founded the first business. I see them every day when I open the phone, and I will tell you, they give me anxiety. They are the artifacts of a lack of productivity.

Well, we're here to eliminate that email anxiety, so we can split this into two problems. There's the, the not opening, but also that number, 90,000, is huge. I mean, it's psychologically daunting, it's scary, it creates anxiety. So what we wanna do is not keep them lying around. I've seen inboxes, believe me, I've seen some inboxes with millions of emails, and nevertheless, people keep them lying around out of a sense of misguided guilt. The idea that perhaps one day we'll reply to these emails. But will you really reply to an email that's older than a month or even older than a week? Well, the answer is probably not. So what we need to do is figure out your email use-by date, the date beyond which we know realistically you're not going to respond to those emails. Archive everything before then and older, and you'll be within a stone's throw of inbox zero.

I always like to say that the E in email, it's for evidence. There are certain emails that are histories of conversations that I would like to memorialize and keep. Say for example, the conversation I had with the lawyers about the formation of the first company. How do you store a conversation I don't plan to open or respond to those emails, but I really would like to keep them.

So there's a nuance here. Of course, when you archive an email, and this is true whether it's in Gmail or in Outlook, and Superhuman works with both of those, you're not losing the email. You're merely removing it from your inbox. And what the studies have shown is if you want to find that particular email again, your brain's actually very, very good at either remembering the sender or remembering a keyword or remembering something about the subject line and going back to retrieve it. Where labeling or where foldering actually does make sense, there is one use case where it does make sense, is collating emails where one search would not otherwise find them all together. For example, my favorite example, but it's a topic no one likes to discuss, taxes, right? You're gonna get a bunch of K-1s, 1099s, all these various bits and pieces depending on what you do. I mean, you are an entrepreneur, you probably get these from like 8 different organizations. It's a lot, right? What I do, and this is my only label, is whenever I get something I know that I'm going to need to give to my accountant later, instead of sort of pre-filing it into Dropbox or what have you, I just give it the taxes label. And then when it comes to tax season, I go to the taxes label or the taxes folder, just go through everything, download it all in one go, and then hand it over. That's because there's no one search that would collate these emails, but that's actually a very rare situation.

I absolutely love that, right? I came for emails, but I'm definitely staying for the taxes. I have not found an efficient way to do it. I mean, we just have big folders of 2018, 2019, 2020. I mean, this is actually something my organization is grappling with right now. So I do appreciate the game for sure.

Okay, so we have don't label, don't folder. We have use keyboard shortcuts. We have archive your backlog. We have a bonus tip on taxes.

Okay.

Okay. The next thing is you mentioned tens of thousands of unread emails. There are basically two ways to manage an inbox. You can either let it grow indefinitely and let the unread emails be the list of things to do, or seems like maybe you do this.

I feel a little bit attacked, but continue, continue.

Or you can archive emails when they're done. And let the inbox itself be the list of things to do. And hopefully I'll convince you that the latter way is better. It turns out to be much faster.

So can I ask, does this work in all email providers or is it just in Superhuman? Because I live in fear of archiving. I've archived things that I haven't been able to find. So I just wanna know, can I do that in, I mean, I am a Superhuman user, so I'll let that slip, but can anybody do that anywhere or does it, only work in Superhuman that way?

It works pretty much anywhere.

Okay, good.

So in Gmail, when you archive an email, it takes it out of the inbox. But if you were to search, you'd find it. And there's a special folder in Gmail called All Mail that has all of your mail, including anything you've archived. And in Outlook, it's a little bit different, but when you archive it, it takes it from the inbox folder and it puts it in an archive folder. But again, searching would find it. And Superhuman works with both of those. So yes, absolutely.

Perfect.

But let's get back to this idea of the two ways to manage your inbox. One, an infinite list with unread emails as the things to do, and the other, hopefully a small list or a smaller list where the things in the inbox are the list of things to do. Let's say you are doing it the first way. Let's say you are meticulously maintaining that unread status and an intriguing new email comes in. You can't help yourself. You're gonna open it, you're gonna glance at it, and oh wow, that dopamine rush hits. But now you have to mark it as unread again because you haven't done the email. But wait a minute, there's one more thing you have to check. So you open it again and now you have to mark it as unread again. And you're doing other emails and something new and shiny comes in and you start to get into this mark unread dance. It is very wasteful and you continuously have to do all of these actions. If you switch to the other way of doing things, you don't have to continuously mark these emails as unread because when you open them, you haven't done them. You only archive it when it's actually done. And not only is this faster because you go from doing N+1 actions per email to just 1 action per email, it also means your inbox itself is way less cluttered and way less stressful. So that's these two different ways of managing your inbox. But you're a founder, you're busy. The biggest problem we all have is not just email volume, it's email variety. If you look at a typical inbox, whether you're a founder or not, it's gonna be all different kinds of emails. Urgent notifications are going to hide behind Google Docs emails. Calendar invites will push critical emails below the fold. You'll have, Project A, Project B, and if you merge your emails, as many people do, you might have family matters mixed in with work matters. Now, most productivity consultants would tell you to start at the top, work your way down at the bottom, and you know, there are some rules like if it takes longer than 2 minutes to do, come back to it later, all of that jazz. That misses the biggest problem, which is if you work on recruiting and then you switch to product and then you're doing some media stuff and then you're doing some copy editing or whatever it is that you do, Your brain is constantly switching gears, and every time your brain switches gears, it takes 20 to 23 minutes for it to recover. This is known as a context switch. It takes 20+ minutes to recover and get back to full efficacy. So how do we fix this? We use a feature called Split Inbox, and this is a thing which is only available in Superhuman, which allows you to take an inbox and to split it up into independent streams that you can then process separately. For example, you can get through all of your Google Docs emails, then you can get through all of your calendar emails. And let's say you use Figma to do design, you can do all of your design work, which is a very different headspace to going through all of the emails from your applicant tracking system and seeing who wants to apply to your company. You can then do all of your internal team emails and unblock everybody internally, which, is one of the most important things you can do as a founder before attending to all of the emails from outside your company, which may be overwhelming in volume itself.

So let's talk about the split for personal life. We talked about optimizing the productivity inside the organization, but I, like many people out there who are watching, may or may not struggle with the balance between being a founder and actually trying to have a life. So how does this productivity outlook apply to maybe you have to manage the renovation on your home, maybe you need to make sure that your kid gets picked up, maybe you actually have to make sure that your groceries get delivered. How do you apply that to life?

Well, there's multiple lenses we can take to answer this question. There are, of course, email techniques, and I happen to use a personal split inbox in Superhuman. If I have long-running projects, I haven't taken on a renovation, that would be a lot. But if I would, I would put those renovation emails in that personal split, or maybe I would even create a project-based split for that. But it sounds like you were also asking a much more zoomed-out question, which is email aside, as founders, we're so busy, how do we manage our lives?

Exactly.

And it's hard. It's not easy. There are many things that we can do. One of the biggest things I've done as a founder, one of the most impactful practices I've taken on is Transcendental Meditation. I think as founders, we hear about and we talk about wellness a lot. We know it's important, but it can often be a struggle. For many years, I struggled with this idea of meditation. I had many false starts. I would try it myself or I would use the apps, but I could never really get a practice to stick. And then I looked at the rest of my founder life, and I realized I had coaches for basically everything else. You want to be a great public speaker, you get a coach. You want to be great at design, find a teacher. You want to be, you know, a great weightlifter or a great athlete, you find a coach. I mean, these are no different. If you want to be great at meditation, I thought, why not get a coach? And so I asked around, and several of my founder friends referred me to this gentleman, Laurent Wallesek. He's the CEO of the Peak Leadership Institute, and this is an organization that teaches Transcendental Meditation, but with the specific focus of helping executives, CEOs, and founders unlock their leadership potential and their peak performance. And Laurent, who is the founder who teaches this, he has been a CEO 3 times over, so he knows exactly the stresses that we're under and how to teach this practice. So he taught me this practice. It was very intensive. We were together for hours a day for the first week or two, and then it tailed off over time. And for the first time, a meditation practice stuck. So I now meditate for an hour a day, half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the evening. And I can honestly say it's changed my life. Initially, I simply felt happier. But over time, I began to notice other more profound effects. I'm more creative, I'm more focused, I have more attention. And I was curious, so I started digging into the research around Transcendental Meditation. And very interestingly, it turns out that of all of the forms of meditation, Transcendental Meditation, or TM as it's often called, is the one that is shown to most impact focus, creativity, attention, and executive function, all the things that you want to drive up as a founder. And other forms of meditation are at best about as good as placebo. So that's been the biggest thing I've done.

One of the things I really thought was fascinating about you is that you have this background in gaming. How does that influence your approach?

I've actually been, confession, obsessed with game design my entire life. As a kid, I learned how to code just so I could make games. And before I was a founder, I was a professional game designer. As a founder, I've gone deep into the principles of game design. Now, as it turns out, there is no unifying theory of game design. Instead, we have to draw upon the art and science of mathematics and narrative and storytelling and psychology and put that all together. And at Superhuman, we found a number of factors, 5 key factors that make for building productivity software that's as fun as a game, productivity software that you can play. And those factors are goals, emotions, toys, controls, and flow. And for each of these, we've come up with principles. An example principle would be make fun toys and then assemble them into games. A question I like to ask is this: is a toy the same as a game? They do seem different. For example, we play with toys, but we play games. A ball is a toy, but football is a game. So let's take an example of a fan favorite feature from Superhuman. You've probably used it thousands of times, the time autocompleter. This is the thing you use to snooze emails. So you pull up the time autocompleter, you hit a keyboard shortcut, and you can type in whatever you want. It can be gibberish and it does its best to understand you. As you know, 2D means 2 days, 3H means 3 hours, 1MO means 1 month. And the time autocompleter is fun because it promotes playful exploration. What does it do? How does it work? When does it break? And I've seen hundreds of people start to learn Superhuman, so I know it's not long that people start trying to break it. They enter 10:10 and they see what happens. Well, that's October the 10th at 10:10 PM, or a series of 2s, that's February 22nd at 2:22. And it's fun to play with. It gives you pleasant surprises. In fact, it's not long before you realize timezone math just works without you having to think about it. You can type in 8:00 AM Tokyo time, and that automatically translates to 1:00 AM local time, and the email is scheduled so you don't have to stay up that late. So if you're building a product and that product is made of features, look at those features and ask, do they indulge playful exploration? Are they fun? Even without a goal, do they create moments of pleasant surprise? If so, congratulations, because what you actually have is a set of fun toys. And with those, you can assemble a really fun game.

So when we talk about optimizing productivity as founders, what does a workflow look like to you?

This is something that I think you can get arbitrarily complex about, but I like to keep it very simple. I believe that as a founder, you've optimized your workflow if you can do 3 things. Number 1, you can rapidly unblock your team. Number 2, you can do the work that you think is most important as well as the work that is most urgent for you. Both of those are obviously critical. And then number 3, you can rapidly respond to external opportunities. We can't live in a silo and we are surrounded by amazing opportunities all day long. So those are the three things. It's as simple as that.

So on that last point of being surrounded by amazing opportunities all day long, when I first started out, I felt a lot of stress because there was always something that I wanted to do that I couldn't or that needed to get done that I didn't get done. How do you approach the mindset piece of productivity? How do you become okay with not being able to do everything? Inevitably, there will be something that you really, really, really want to do, but you're not going to be able to get it done.

Well, let's get a little bit philosophical and talk about the difference between submission and surrender. When you submit to something, you don't have agency. You're being forced into it. The circumstances are making you do the thing. If you submit to only having 24 hours in a day, or maybe 8 productive hours. And this idea that you are unable to do all the things that you can possibly do, you are giving up your power in that situation. And I think that's the trap that many first-time founders fall into. I certainly did. It creates anxiety. But the honest truth is we can't do everything. So what mindset do we take? It's not submission, it's surrender. When you surrender to the idea that there are 24 hours in a day, or maybe only 8, 10, whatever useful working hours, you're making an active choice to say, yep, this is the reality of the world. This is the reality that everybody has to face. And these are the hours I have, and I'm okay with this, and I'm going to roll with this, and these are the things that I'm going to do. Now I realize it can sound like just two very similar sounding words, but if you really embody them and embody the difference between what it is to be submitted to something and what it is to surrender to something, you'll feel the difference. Submission is something that is done to you. Surrender is something that you are in control of and that you are choosing to do. And that's the mindset difference.

Yeah, sometimes I choose not to do cardio.

Well, that's a form of surrender in its own way. And maybe you're going to spend that time doing something else.

I do. I do. Although I've sort of taken your approach where I now have reached a new level of boss where I'm able to communicate efficiently using AI-enabled tools on the treadmill. So I've been able to craft my emails while I work out.

Amazing.

Well, I know that no two days as a founder are the same. Can you walk us through a day in your life?

If I have to. I'll wake up with an alarm. But believe you me, my preference is not to do that. And multiple studies have shown it's best to wake up without an alarm. So I try to train myself to wake up at roughly the same time every day. Once I'm awake, I'll then do that transcendental meditation that we've talked about, and that takes about half an hour. Then depending on what the day is, I'll hit the gym and do one thing or another. I usually alternate strength with zone 2 cardio. So some days I'll do half an hour of zone 2 cardio. I like to use an elliptical because unlike running, I can listen to a podcast or like watch something on YouTube or whatever. It's relatively easy to focus on a screen. And then when I'm doing strength training, I just go down to the garage where we've, you know, built out a COVID-style gym and I do my stuff there. That takes a lot of time. And some days, especially if it's leg days, it's going to take some time. And over the years, I've just had to surrender to the idea that if I want to be in peak physical condition, which then means I'm in peak CEO condition, this is time that I have to invest. And there's a big mindset shift there from this is time that's being taken away from the company to actually this is time I'm investing in me, which I can then put into the company. So I then do my morning's worth of work, which is usually product design or marketing, and that will take me straight into lunch. Now, for me, lunch is a very sacred thing almost. And because I'm taking my health very seriously, insofar as possible, I actually cook all of my own meals myself and I count my macros plus or minus to the gram, which may sound crazy for a lot of people, but I'm dialing it in for protein, for carbs and for fats. And you want to hear something even crazier? I have eaten the same meal for dinner and for lunch every single day for probably the past 40, 45 days at this point, because I'm experimenting with the recipe. I'm dialing little bits up, dialing little bits down. For me, it's a pursuit of art. It's a pursuit of craft. And every single day it gets just a little bit more delicious. I actually see it as no different to building a delightful product, constructing a delightful meal. So that's my little side quest for lunchtime. I really enjoy it and it allows me to also achieve my physical goals because it goes hand in hand with working out. And then I take another stretch of work. I usually meditate at around 3:00, 3:30 PM, which is when my body naturally starts craving that, and that resets me. Without that, I wouldn't be able to function effectively for the afternoon and the early evening periods of work. But then I go into that before breaking again for dinner.

I usually have a cookie.

A cookie?

Yeah.

What time do you have the cookie?

3 o'clock.

3 o'clock.

3 o'clock I have a cookie. I will get a glass of water. And in the pandemic, I actually started this and I love it. Go for a walk.

You know, they say when we're snacking, Maybe that's actually a signal we're misinterpreting. I would be very curious what happened if instead of having a cookie, you meditated for half an hour instead. Would that cookie craving go away?

You know what's interesting is I actually— so I meditate in the morning and I meditate in the evening time, but I usually do that as part of, like you, my routine. So I have a period of time in the morning that I block out, and I make it very clear to everybody that I am unreachable. I get up, I meditate and I pray because I don't view those as the same thing. And then I typically will walk to the gym, I'll have my workout, and then I will start emailing. Now with the rise of AI, I've been a little bit more efficient at the gym. I can kind of actually compose emails that make sense while I'm working out these days. But then I start my day. The evening snack, it's like a treat, it's a reward. It's a reward for staying on track because I, like you, actually eat relatively the same thing almost every day for lunch. I to be an amateur bodybuilder, and I just love the regularity of that. Now, I don't cook, so I need to know what your recipe is for lunch. I mean, I cook, but I don't cook during lunch 'cause I don't typically have enough time. So I try to prep beforehand and just grab something and go. But the 3:00 PM snack, and cookies now are actually very good, right? I've got vegan cookies, I've got low-carb cookies, I've got a lot of cookie. So I get to try it out, but I will refrain. I will think of you as I refrain from that cookie and maybe go for broccoli or something.

It's just an interesting question. When is the optimal time for meditation? I haven't experimented with this, but what I was taught by Laurent, who is the CEO of that leadership institute, is what he has found, and he has experimented with this himself and also through a number of clients, is about mid-afternoon. Is ideal if what you're trying to do is optimize energy across the course of the day, and also you meditate in the morning. But of course, everyone has a different circadian rhythm, so it's something that we each have to find ourselves.

We're going to take a quick break and be back with more from Ayesha with Rahul Vohra.

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Having gone through 5 rounds of funding, of which you recently closed a Series C at $75 million, How do you balance productivity with fundraising?

It isn't easy, and fundraising can suck up a huge amount of time, especially if it isn't going well. And sometimes we don't get a choice. It's fundraising or bust when we're running out of money. But there are things that we can do to avoid that situation. There are two types of fundraise. The preempted fundraise and the marketed fundraise. The marketed fundraise is when you quote unquote go out to market and you tell people, hey, I'm over here, I'm fundraising, come talk to me, we're going to have conversations, they're going to take this long, and some founders try and set a deadline. I don't think that'll work as well these days as it may have would a few years ago, but that's the marketed fundraise. The preempted fundraise is very different. It's when no one knew that you were ever fundraising and just quietly out of nowhere, you seem to have raised money. Now that's the ideal one. If at all possible, you want to be preempted. You don't want to be in market at all. So the question is, how do you get there? And it turns out the answer is by simultaneously being perpetually always in a state of not fundraising whilst making great progress with the company and also being open to introductions from good VCs. Now it does require two preconditions. You have to, number one, be making great progress with the company, and number two, you have to have some good VC relationships to kick those things off. But if you're not making great progress with the company, fundraising isn't going to happen anyway. So you can really boil it down to just those two, two little bits. Make sure the company's in great shape, and that's the number one thing to focus on. If that's not true, you're not going to raise. And also have 2, 3, maybe 4 really good VC relationships so you can start the preemption process when you're ready.

So as you know, women and minorities receive a small percentage of VC funding. Say you're making great progress, but maybe you don't have those traditional relationships. How then would you approach it?

Almost all the best funding rounds and all of the ones that we've been through at Superhuman have come through connection and warm introduction. One of the arts, I should say, of being a great founder is meeting other great founders. I mean, it's a true benefit, a true privilege. One of my favorite things to do is hang out with other great founders. And we want to help each other. So I would say Reach out to other founders who've received funding and say, which are the investors you liked working with? Which are the investors you didn't like working with? Which ones caused trouble at companies? I mean, not all investors are great and some of them unfortunately are actively harmful. You want to avoid those. And this is where that founder reference network is invaluable and there is nothing else quite like it in the world. And we're all part of different communities. For example, my last company I took through Y Combinator. I actually didn't take Superhuman through Y Combinator, but I'm still very much a part of that community. And so when it came to reference-checking investors and for asking introductions to investors, that was my first port of call to speak to all of the Y Combinator partners and many of the other founders and say, well, who's cool these days? Who's not cool? Who should I speak with? And who should we consider? For this next round of funding.

So I imagine that you see a lot of things. What are some of the biggest productivity issues that you see other founders struggling with?

The biggest one is time to respond, and that could be email, but it could also be DMs, it could be text message, it could be to a customer complaining on Twitter. It all boils down to time to respond. It's a litmus test for anything else. Sam Altman actually wrote a program to measure time to respond. And he looked at great founders, those who went on to create billion-dollar companies, and he compared those with bad founders, those whose companies went on to struggle and eventually fail. And what Sam found is that the bad founders, as you might predict, took days to respond to an email. He was measuring this on email. Sometimes even weeks. Whereas the great founders, minutes. All the famous founders that you and I could think of off the top of our heads, minutes to respond to emails. Now you might think, well, maybe that's just impressing a potential investor or another very important person. But like I said, it's a litmus test for everything else about your company. If you've ever thought as a founder, oh, I wish people would do more, or I wish things would move faster, here's the newsflash. Nothing will happen at your company faster than you're pushing it to happen. You set the bar for speed at the company as a founder. But this cuts both ways. The magic works the other way also. The moment that we as founders start moving faster, our companies move faster also.

I hear you're a big fan of the Switchlog. What is it? How do you track it? And what do you learn from it?

I came to the Switchlog through the question, do you know how you spend your time? Many people think they do, but do you really know? And a calendar isn't the answer. A calendar records what you thought was going to happen, but it's a poor reflection of reality. Urgent tasks crop up all the time that aren't on the calendar, and many founders have important work that can't go on the calendar for whatever reason. So I came up with the Switchlog. It's very simple, 3 steps. Number 1, log whenever you start a task. Number 2, log whenever you switch a task. Number 3, log whenever you take a break. And that's it. Now, I happen to use Slack to do this log. You can do this in a private channel. You can do this with an EA if you happen to work with one. And the way that it looks is TS: that stands for task switch, and then the thing that you're doing. So for me, for example, it might be 9, I wouldn't write the time because Slack captures the time, but TS: Review launch materials for today. And then perhaps 9:30, review latest product design. 10:00, review latest something else. And so on and so on. The reality of being a founder is things are going to crop up all the time. Urgent things, things you didn't plan for, things that weren't on your calendar. And if you're like me, you might want to only do a task for 2 minutes before you go, ah, I really don't feel like doing that thing. I want to go and do some other things. The switch log accommodates all of that. If you switch from one task to another in 5 minutes, that's fine. Just send another task switch. If you forget to log a task, which is also very common, that's fine. Just go back into the Slack channel and write the time and the name of the action, and it can be fixed later on. And if you take a break, that's also fine. Just go ts: break. This way, instead of constantly feeling anxiety around what is it I should be doing, just trust your gut. As founders, we have great intuition. In fact, that's our secret weapon, is to constantly be refining and honing that intuition and follow it. Of course, turn up to your meetings. I'm not saying bail on all your meetings. Go to those. But then with the rest of the time, do what you feel is important. Do what you feel is urgent and write down what happens. Now, at the end of the week, you can do this yourself or you can have an assistant help if you have one. Categorize all of the task switches into categories, then chart that in a pie chart and then compare that to your ideal week. You'll now see where your time is going And you can also make actionable changes. You can say, well, I don't want to spend that much time on this task. I want to spend more time on this task over here. When I did this a few years ago, I saw I was spending more than half of my week on recruiting. And at the time it was the right thing to do. But I also knew that over time I wanted to shrink the amount of time I was spending on that and increase the amount of time I was spending on product design and marketing. So you'll remember I mentioned that I now spend 60 to 70% of my time on that. Back in those days, I was spending 7 to 10% of my time on that. So there's this thing that I'm world-class at doing that I was spending less than 10% of my time on. Obviously not ideal for the company. The calendar will record what you thought happened, whereas the Switchlog will tell you what actually happened, and then you can make changes to suit.

How has your approach to productivity evolved over time? You've gone from Reportive to Superhuman. What's that transition been like?

In the early days, I would simply try and work as many hours as I could with deleterious health effects. Over time, I've come to realize that working on the right things is so much more important than working as many hours as you can. And I often think back to the sale of my last company, Reportive, as a great example of this. Ultimately, the reason that we were acquired was due to perhaps less than 10% of the overall work that we did in building that product and in building that company. So the trick, of course, is figuring out what the right 10% is, what the most important things to work on are. And that's been the major evolution in how I approach work over time. So it's fewer hours, but I am highly confident that the things I'm working on are so much more effective than they used to be. And to our previous discussion, that frees up time to invest in health, to invest in mental wellness, and in being the best CEO possible. It starts to create this positive recurring cycle.

Let's talk meetings. I personally have too many of them. What is your approach to meetings?

Well, Well, try and have fewer of them is probably the easiest place to start. We can talk about how. There's something that we uniquely do at Superhuman called the staggered calendar that I think any startup, any founder can benefit from. So if you look at most founders' calendars, it's usually an inefficient mess. One-on-ones will happen randomly throughout the week. Team meetings will happen whenever everybody happens to be free. And there's little, if any, time free for deep, uninterrupted work. So here's what you do. Put your team meeting on a Wednesday. Put all of your one-on-ones the day before on a Tuesday. Ask your direct reports to do their team meetings on that same Tuesday, and they'll then have all of their one-on-ones the day before on a Monday. If your direct reports also have managers as direct reports, you can stagger the whole thing by one more day and, and so on for as many layers as there in the company. Doing things in this way has a number of key benefits. Number 1, information runs through the company really quickly. For example, a problem might be discussed in one-on-ones in specific sub-teams on Monday, then in departments on Tuesday, and it will reach you no less than 2 days later on Wednesday. Number 2, problems are actually usually solved along the way. Folks will discuss them on Monday, likely come up with a solution on Tuesday, and by the time it reaches you on Wednesday, it's solved.

It's in the mail.

Exactly. And number 3, which you might really appreciate, it actually leaves most of Monday, all of Tuesday, and all of Thursday and Friday free for deep uninterrupted work, which is when we get to do the stuff that only we uniquely can do. So, that's the staggered calendar, and it can have a huge impact.

Do you have any rules of thumb about meeting length? While I may have many meetings, one of the things that I did was I decided to protect my calendar. I am infamous for lunches on there, right? I've got noon, it's lunch, I'm eating because as a founder I need to put some regularity around my eating schedule. But I also decided that meetings were only gonna go 45 minutes to an hour when they absolutely had to. And we employed more of a standup approach for some other meetings where I really wanted to put the pressure on the team to get them done efficiently. Do you have any approaches like that that you use?

Very similar. I can't actually think of any regular meeting I'm in that lasts an hour. I think if you have that, you should look at that and go, does it really need to be an hour? So I would take 30 minutes or 45 minutes by default. And actually even that makes me feel, well, why don't we talk and see how long it takes? If we can get this wrapped in 15 or 20 minutes, Why don't we simply do that?

Any strategies for getting to 15 minutes from 30?

Start a timer. I love this.

I love this.

Set it as a goal. Just say, why don't we aim to be done in 15 minutes?

Okay.

There's nothing like constraints to actually get people to business and get through things.

I agree, but you know that no one wants to feel like they're on the clock. So I like your approach of, well, why don't we try to get this done just subtle suggestion. Why don't we try to wrap this up in 15?

I mean, you can do it that way, or you can just say, we're going to be done in 15 minutes.

I want people to feel as though they can feel relaxed when they come to me and that they don't necessarily feel pressure to be efficient, although I understand the necessity, because sometimes when people are efficient, they leave out really important things that are more emotional. And so I like to give the room for that. There are some people you can speak to very directly and they're crisp and they're ready for that. But then there are other people, depending how they are, where they just want to be able to take their time and maybe they express themselves a little bit more slowly. But I want to give them the fullness of the 30 minutes. I understand the 45 minutes or the hour, but 15, I'd never really thought to approach it that way.

I think a lot of this depends on the kind of person that you best work with, the seniority of person that you want reporting to you. And certainly what I found is over time, as Superhuman has grown larger, the ability of the people I've worked with in terms of their communication with me to, for example, hit 15 minutes or to be very crisp, precise, and to the point, or to compartmentalize and say, I want to have a discussion about how I feel about this, but I realize we have to make a decision. So let's have the decision discussion really quickly and maybe let's circle back to the How is everyone feeling about this conversation? The ability for people to do that, I found, just increases over time.

That's really interesting. Well, just to make sure that I understand it, everybody else is having more meetings, but not you, right? You're staggering it so that everyone else, so the people that are reporting to you, they're having the meetings and then the information will trickle up.

No, there are no more or less meetings with the staggered calendar. It just squeezes them all into 2 or 3 days and does puts them in the correct sequence.

Right.

So that by the time—

So information moves really fast because in most companies it can take up to a week or two to actually get all the way to you, whereas this does it in 2 days.

Got it. So you have an approach that combines staggered meetings and focus days. You have the staggered meetings earlier in the week and then you have the focus days. Tell me a little bit more about the focus days and are meetings prohibited on these days?

One of the biggest challenges with running a startup is making sure that everybody has the ability to do deep, uninterrupted work. This is the kind of work which again, only we uniquely can do. And it's true for absolutely everybody at the company. So we've come up with this concept and it's by no means unique. A lot of companies do this called a focus day or a no-meeting day. And the idea is that yes, there are no meetings on that day. Pick whatever day it is that works best for your company. We've done 3 things that help people do this more effectively. So number 1, it truly is a no-meeting day, and that's true for managers and even the most cross-functional people. Number 2, we've published some guidelines on how best to use the focus days for different functions. What might you think of doing when you're not in a meeting? And then number 3, in order to reduce the overall meeting load, because otherwise what would happen is you're really just shunting meetings to other days, constantly looking at recurring meetings. You can do this, for example, quarterly or monthly, and by default removing them from the calendar and they have to earn their way back on. So imagine every quarter you go to your calendar, take off every single recurring meeting, and it has to earn its way back on.

How do you measure the productivity of the focus days?

That's a really great question. I think we're relatively early in starting focus days again. We did them for a brief period many years ago. We've started them again recently, and I'm not sure that we have a quantitative metric that I would put on the focus days as of yet. But more important than any such kind of metric that we could come up with is how does it make people feel? How does it make people feel about working on those days compared to other days? One of the things that we do is give ample time for people to give feedback. For example, in our all-hands, we have Q&As where people can ask a question of me or any other leader in the company. And we also do anonymous employee surveys. We then take the themes from that, we create an action plan, and we translate that transparently relay that back to the company. So going back to this idea of focus days, the main metric I'd put on it is how do people feel about it? Do people feel more focused? Do people feel like they're able to do the deep uninterrupted work that otherwise they wouldn't be able to get done?

What's your next move when it comes to maximizing productivity?

There's a saying for CEOs and founders, which is our job changes every 6 months. I would go one further, which is to say our job should change every 6 months. If it's not, maybe you need to figure out why and try and get onto that next level. So today I'm spending 60, 70% of my time on product design and marketing. And this is teaching the craft, which has been hard learned over the last 20, 30 years of me doing this very deeply in each of those 3 areas. And I've realized over time that for me, that's an intuitive process. I don't necessarily have a checklist or a set of rules or even a sequence of patterns that I follow. I often just look at a design and for better or for worse, I know. I look at interaction design and I know, or I can talk it through and quickly get to a state of knowing. But when it comes to teaching others, that's not a particularly effective way of being. It can achieve an outcome. It can design a beautiful product that solves a real problem and can create a real business. But in order to get to the next level, I now want to teach other people how to do that. And that does involve translating the state of knowingness into checklists and patterns and rules and sequences. So that's my next move.

Rahul, thank you so much for having me here at the Superhuman offices. I have loved our conversation today, from optimizing productivity to your focus on health and wellness and to how we can all run meetings more efficiently. I know that I'll be taking back one particular insight, which is how I can get my meetings down from 30 minutes to 15.

Well, it's been really fun to talk through, and I hope it will be very helpful to many founders.

Oh, I know it will. And we're really looking forward to your next move.

That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producer is Matt Toder. Editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Executive producer is Josh Christiansen. If you haven't already, subscribe to Your Next Move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your Next Move is a production of Inc. and Capital One Business.