
Superhuman and the Productivity Meta-Layer - julian_digital
https://julian.digital/2020/01/17/superhuman-the-productivity-meta-layer/
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joelrunyon
> 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](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.

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webmaven
> Full disclosure: I'm an advisor for the company.

Which company, Superhuman or Woven?

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jonathanbull
Woven: [https://angel.co/joelrunyon](https://angel.co/joelrunyon)

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matlin
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.

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radicaldreamer
A lot of these companies want to gather data from you, so they make users
click through rather than including all of that in the email itself.

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matlin
That's definitely true for the big companies with freemium services but I'm
optimistic that the services that you pay for or the ones that want to spend
less on engineering may find it simpler and aligned with their users to just
send the relevant info in completion to your email and make a small plugin to
visualize or aggregate it for you. That is of course only possible if this
option was available to them...

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robbiemitchell
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.

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priyadarshy
This takes the idea of work being a queue of queues to the extreme:
[https://amontalenti.com/2019/11/04/work-is-a-queue-of-
queues](https://amontalenti.com/2019/11/04/work-is-a-queue-of-queues)

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thesorrow
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Raindrop)

~~~
PaulHoule
Sounds like what the Baltimore Police Department does with Lotus Notes.

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babesh
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.

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webmaven
Sounds a lot ike GMail's actions:

[https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/actions/actions-o...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/actions/actions-
overview)

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itsevrgrn
I like the way you designed your website!

