How the Head of Growth at Superhuman Does His Email

There must be a lot of pressure being on the founding team of an email client like Superhuman. You’re supposed to be the best at email — superhuman, in fact. So what happens if you’re having an off day?

For the rest of us we can shrug off a slow response with, “Sorry, my inbox is slammed.” But Gaurav Vohra doesn’t have that excuse.

His product, Superhuman, is designed to keep you focused and in flow so you can get through your inbox twice as fast as before. So I wonder what happens when Gaurav doesn’t get back to someone as quickly as he wants to?

Maybe he says, “Sorry for the slow response, I switched back to Gmail this week.”

Or, just maybe, the product he’s built is so good that he doesn’t have off days any more. Maybe he’s developed such an anxious-attachment to his email that corresponding with him is like emailing with the world’s most talkative time traveler: his replies arrive so quickly it feels like they get there before you even hit send.

The answer, it turns out, is pretty surprising:

Gaurav doesn’t worry too much about response time.

He has explicitly told everyone he works with not to expect a reply from him in less than 24 hours. And that’s only if they email him on weekdays.

On weekends? Forget about it. He often doesn’t check his work email at all.

That’s because Gaurav only checks his email twice a day. He triages once in the morning and tries to reply to everything else in one focused session at night.

It comes down to a philosophy Gaurav uses to run his work life, and one that’s built into Superhuman’s product itself:

The best way to work is to be in flow as much as possible. And the best way to be in flow is to minimize distractions, and create large blocks of time to do similar tasks all at once — so that you minimize context switching.

And if you’re doing all that you also need to make sure that you’re taking time for rest and recovery. That’s why Gaurav doesn’t work on weekends and takes what he calls “European” levels of vacation.

It’s a unique perspective for someone that spends his life building a productivity app. And it’s quite refreshing.

In this interview Gaurav tells us how he uses this philosophy of flow to govern his work life: from his email habits, to his schedule, to his task management. He tells us why he keeps his todo list in Sublime (hint: it’s good at keeping you in flow) and gives us tips for how to deal with emails that aren’t time sensitive, but require more thought to reply to. He even tells us about how his philosophy of flow has seeped into the design of the Superhuman app itself.

It’s a fun interview, and there’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive in!

Gaurav introduces himself

My name is Gaurav. I’m the Head of Growth at Superhuman, which means I focus on a lot of different things—from brand and marketing to onboarding processes, to customer success, and analytics. It’s a varied role, and it’s always changing. A few years ago, for example, I focused exclusively on hiring engineers because that’s what we needed to grow.

But at the heart of it all, whatever I’m doing, my real interest is in productivity. I really like creating order from chaos. It’s that spirit I bring to pretty much everything in my life. Organizing and finding equilibrium in systems is a consistent core value throughout my work.

Being productive is all about managing flow

For me, personal productivity is all about maximizing flow. I’m a really big believer in the idea of flow. If you can get yourself into a state where you’re doing the same thing for a chunk of time, then you’ll get a lot more done than if you’re dipping in and out throughout the day. That requires a lot of energy; it requires focus.

There are two ways to do this: First, what I want to do is immerse myself in my work for long periods of time, rather than dipping in and out. Second, I want to find ways to maintain focus by minimizing distracting processes and information — I only want my brain to worry about the task at hand.

If I can do both of these things — giving myself long blocks of time to work, and minimizing distractions — I have a good shot at getting my work done.

One of the biggest places where these techniques are most important is in my email. It’s where a lot of people spend a lot of time each day — and over the years and through my work at Superhuman I’ve developed a few habits that help me more effectively get through my inbox.

This is how I do it.

I check email twice a day, including a brief morning session on my phone

I check my email only twice a day: once in the morning and once at night.

In the morning, it actually starts on my phone.

I use the Superhuman mobile app, and I will try to get through all of my email on my phone first thing.

I’ll just start at the top, and I’ll start going through my inbox. I’ll archive things I don’t need, I’ll reply to anything that needs a quick response, and mark things for later that I need to get to when I’m on my laptop.

I’m barely reading; I'm just triaging. And Superhuman makes it very easy to do this because every time I take action on an email, it shows me the next one in my inbox automatically so that I don’t have to manually click to the next email. I just have to triage.

I’m trying to not get stuck or bogged down in any one particular email. For anything that I can’t take action on immediately, I’ll send it to my desktop so I can look at it when I’m my computer. Or I’ll snooze it to be resurfaced in my inbox this weekend or next week.

I use stars to mark projects I want to get back to later

While I’m triaging, if I come across an email that I need to give a little bit more thought to, I’ll star it. For me, stars are projects that need to be taken action on. They’re things I need to think about, but I haven’t figured out where to slot them in. I don’t know where, or if, they fit yet.

Later on, I’ll comb through the stars — once a week, or a month, or a quarter — and decide what to do with them. None of them are urgent, so it’s okay for me to let them sit for a while as I decide what to do with them.

Once I’m done triaging my inbox, I’ll check through my splits to scan for whether I have missed anything.