AI vs. Email Overload: My Superhuman Productivity Secret!

I have been waiting for this day for a long time. Finally, after years of waiting, we can apply the magic of artificial intelligence to one of the curses, the long standing problems and challenges of knowledge, work and really just modern life. Email. Let's talk about what it looks like to use AI with your email. Specifically, I'm talking about the email app known as Superhuman. Superhuman is really for people that are email intensive that send and receive very large quantities of email. They found dozens, if not hundreds of small and large improvements to really make the email experience faster, more efficient, more intuitive, more enjoyable. Even in this video, I'm going to show you how Superhuman is using AI to make the email answering experience even more efficient, even more fluid, and something that takes even less of your time every day. Email is a blessing on our lives with the caveat that we really need to figure out our own process. I have my own process which I call One Touch to Inbox Zero. I've written about it, I've made a video about it. You can check those out. How incredible it is that we can sit in front of a screen, effortlessly communicate with dozens, hundreds, thousands of people all across the world, all 100% for free. It's such a good solution that it becomes a problem within itself. Email requires very dramatic context shifts. A context shift is when you're having one conversation with a lot of context details and then suddenly you have to shift. You have to pivot in one second to a completely different conversation. That's hard enough to do one time. Now email takes that to the nth degree. When I look at my email inbox, with each line representing a different conversation, a different relationship, a different issue that we're discussing, each one of those messages requires a context shift. Every one of those context shifts is jarring. It actually takes energy. And so one way of thinking about Superhuman AI is making those context shifts a little easier. If even a little part of that cognitive burden, 10%, 20%, 30%, can be lifted from your shoulders. So it's a little bit easier to shift from one context to another. That's already a huge improvement. So with that context in mind, let's dive into my real email inbox. My typical process, as I've described elsewhere, I always start at the oldest message and then I go one at a time in order from oldest at the bottom here to newest at the top, making one single decision about each email, which is what is needed next. Sometimes what's needed next is to just archive it, which is the equivalent of deleting it sometimes. What's needed is a reply. Sometimes what's needed is to forward it to someone on my. Sometimes what's needed is for me to just take some time to really think about what I want to come out of this interaction. So let's do it. It looks like the first email I received early this morning at 2:30am I'm just going to click on it. I see who it's from, which is someone at Google. I see that it was forwarded to me by my UK publisher. I can see in the subject that it looks like a toxic Google, which I know is a series of in person presentations that they host. And as I read the message down here, I now have the context. I've loaded up the context that I'm being invited to the Google campus in Mountain View in the Bay Area to give a talk, to give a presentation about my upcoming book, the Parent Method. Incredible. Huge. Amazing. This is one of those emails that you are very happy to receive that you wait a long time to get in your inbox. I'm super happy. This is very exciting. I want to respond quickly, affirmatively, really convey that I'm not just willing to. I'm very excited to do this. So what, what I'm going to do is just hit the R key on my keyboard. Like any email program, it's going to create a draft responding to that person. This is where I can really start to use the AI feature. If you think about typing out a reply like this, it's actually pretty cognitively demanding. You have to think about, okay, what am I trying to say? How am I trying to say it? You have to be polite, you have to be cordial and professional. You have to try to avoid certain mistakes or you don't want them to get certain wrong impressions. There's a whole social, psychological, logical, complex web of concerns that is needed to write even a relatively short and easy email like this one. Think of AI not as something that's going to come in and completely replace all 100% of that thinking. That's not going to happen anytime soon. You need to be in the loop. You need to be part of this process. What AI can do is relieve, I don't know, maybe 10, 20, 30% of the cognitive load, the cognitive burden that is required to generate this response. So the way that I'm going to call up AI, and I really like that you have to proactively call it up. It's not going to jump in and, you know, take actions on your behalf if you don't want to is by simply Hitting command J. By hitting command J, a couple things happened. The AI feature was activated. You can see there's a blue box here, multicolored box that shows you what it's doing. And then it's going to offer, which you can see right here, to write a draft, write a draft of your response. There's also this little pop up down here that shows you an example. It's showing you that you can write one point. So one point or one thing you want to say per line, you don't have to use bullet points or numbers or anything like that. And then you can hit Enter to have it actually write the email, or you can do Shift plus Enter if you want to just go to the next line. So I'm going to try the simplest version of this and let's see what comes up, which is simply yes. I mean, isn't that the gist of what I want to say? What I want her to conclude from my message is that I am agreeing, I am accepting her invitation. So I'm going to hit return. And there we go. This is actually not bad, but I think we can do a bit better. And that's where this little line at the bottom is so important. Very, very often the first output from AI, whether in Superhuman or elsewhere, is not acceptable. It's decent. Sometimes it's even good or very good. But it often needs iteration. And this is the key tip for working with AI that I really encourage people to adopt is don't try to get it perfect. The right try, it's not going to work. You need iterations, you need mult. You need to go through a feedback loop with the AI to arrive at something that is, that is good enough. So I could just hit one of these buttons down here. I could simply accept the draft reply that AI has made. I could try again. I could shorten it, I could lengthen it. Okay, let's actually try lengthen. And there's even a few down here. Actually, I could simplify it. I could improve the writing. I could fix the spelling and grammar, or I could rewrite in my voice. So let's try lengthening it. Okay. This is all very standard and kind of expected professional language, but I think we could still do better. Okay, we got the length right. It's the right amount of sort of detail to put in my reply. But I'm going to go down here and actually say rewrite in my voice. Let's see how it did. I was so excited. That is something I would say. Looks like this sentence is a Bit more detailed. I want to know the event specifics, like the venue, time, anything else that might be relevant. Okay, so this is another small improvement, another small step in making this something that is very close to what I would have written myself. I'm just going to make one change. There is one way that I would make this better, which is to make it a little less formal. This is something that I really try to do in all my communications, really including with external parties, is I just find if I can be a bit more personal, a little more casual and informal, it tends to actually make communication more efficient. Takes time and effort to make things formal. Therefore, I'm actually going to ask it to be slightly, in a way less professional. So I'll just say make it a little less formal and professional. Enter so you can see. Hope you're doing well. It's a little less formal. I got your invite. I'm pumped to join. This is actually genuinely closer to how I would respond to an email like this one. And as I scan it, let's see where is it happening and when. That's better. If you could let me know what I'll be doing on the day. That's better. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this. This is actually ready to go. So what I can do is hit accept right here. You can see it inserts the text that it generated, that we generated together, right into a reply. I'll just do a once over one more time and then I'll hit send right here. Once that is sent, I can just scroll back up to the original email, hit E on my keyboard for archive, and that is done. Let's move on to the next email. This is a message from someone I'm collaborating with in Brazil. And as you can see, it's in Portuguese. I actually speak Portuguese, so I could understand this, but it definitely takes more cognitive effort for me to read and understand Portuguese versus English. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do Command J to activate the AI feature. And as you can see right here, there's two different modes. There's writing mode and then there's editing mode. To translate this, I'm actually going to hit Command J again. You can see right turns to edit right here. And then a button appears right here to summarize this conversation. So this is already an improvement to see that there's three main points, but I'm actually going to ask it. And this is where you can actually kind of have a conversation with the AI as if it was almost like a personal assistant. I'm going to say translate to English. Joel Ameno Silva, who's my collaborator, sends flight and hotel reservations to the three of us for the Fire Hotmart event that I'm going to be speaking at. He requests confirmation of receipt. That's interesting for me to know that tells me what is needed from my side. And then he says a farewell and hugs, which is a very Brazilian way to end a message. So that's actually all I needed. I'm actually going to discard this draft or this bullet point summary by doing shift command period. You can see it says draft discarded right here. Because I now have the context that I need. I'll just hit return to create a reply all, then once again activate AI with command J. And I'm just going to say confirm receipt. Right? That. That was the thing he was asking for, after all. So I'll hit return and there is a really perfectly worded reply confirming receipt of this email. The only improvement that I want to make, of course, is to be polite and reply in the same language that he wrote in. So I'm just going to ask the AI to translate to not just Portuguese, but Brazilian Portuguese, because there are small differences. And there we go. Now I can hit return again to accept the message, then hit command return to send the message. Once that's done, I can scroll up to the top again, hit E to archive, and we're finished with that message. Okay, we got a few more here. So first thing I notice is this is a long chain between Tyler, who's actually on the superhuman team, and we are coordinating with to produce this very video, and Mark, who is on our team. So it looks like I've been cc'd to provide my input and think about what a common occurrence this is. How common is it for you to be added to an email chain to get your opinion, to get a green light, to get a decision, or simply to keep you informed? That is actually a great use of email. Certainly much better than having to set a meeting and talk about it for an hour. But it's also quite a challenge. Imagine going through probably thousands of words of back and forth and back and forth, trying to understand all the little contextual details here, and then which of those details I actually need to know and act on. So this is probably the single most powerful use of superhuman AI that I use almost every day, which is to summarize email chains. The way this looks is once again command J, then command J again to go into edit Mode. Then I can just hit enter as the summarize conversation button right here is already highlighted. So I'll hit enter and there we go. Think for a minute about how incredible this is. How long would I have needed to create in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 point bullet summary summarizing just the key points of this long conversation. I would probably just take 30 seconds to read through this. In fact, let's do that. They've invited me to participate in the beta. Okay, Tally resolves it. Don't need to know the details. I'm actually going to the bottom here to see what was the most recent thing that happened, which is Mark asking Tyler for the unique signup link and then someone being added, someone from the community team in order to provide that link. So there's actually nothing for me to do. Wonderful. Best case scenario. I love when there's nothing for me to do, but it was still useful for me to know. All I need to know from this summary is I can rest easy. Nothing is needed from my end. I'm actually going to just hit Escape return to discard this entire response. Then I'm going to hit Shift command period to delete that draft that had been created when I started using the AI feature. You can see down here, the draft was discarded. Then I'm going to hit E to archive the entire thread. That was my typical weekday morning process to clear my entire inbox. Now it took longer because I was explaining things and demoing things, but I can easily get through that in less than five minutes. What would be possible? What would open up for you? How much time? How much bandwidth? How much energy? If you could clear your entire email backlog every day in less than five minutes. This is the potential of having a specialized email software program such as Superhuman. This is the power of having a repeatable process. And last of all and the subject of this video, it's the power of having an AI program that can just constantly take little or sometimes big loads off your shoulders. It can constantly do in seconds what would have taken you minutes. I hope you enjoy this demo. If you saw yourself in me or any of the examples I shared, if you saw any potential to improve your own workflow, I really encourage you to use the link in the description to sign up for Superhuman, activate the AI feature and find out what is possible when you use the incredible power of artificial intelligence. Plus the amazing software program that Superhuman has designed to make email. You can believe it. Not just more efficient and less time consuming, but something that is actually enjoyable and natural and and fluid part of your day. And if you'd like to learn more about how to consistently reach inbox zero, check out this video next.