Workplace

Finding flow: Superhuman's CEO wants to help you get stuff done

Rahul Vohra has some tricks for achieving “flow," an uninterrupted, all-absorbing state of work that resists procrastination and useless meetings.

Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra

CEO Rahul Vohra has developed philosophies and hacks to live by — both for Superhuman employees and for Superhuman clients.

Photo: Superhuman

Rahul Vohra could spend hours talking about productivity. But he won’t, because that would be a waste of time. As the CEO of Superhuman, the $30-per-month email app, productivity is kind of his job. He’s developed philosophies and hacks to live by — both for Superhuman employees and for Superhuman clients. The company’s blog is a treasure trove of posts telling you how to better retain information, or how to write a good email. Vohra has penned many of the posts himself.

“I knew when I was about 12 or 13 years old that I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” Vohra said. “I actually started on that path relatively early during university, and so I found myself in a position where I was managing my own time.”

He quickly learned that like most of us, he was pretty bad at it. In fact, he still struggles with managing and prioritizing his time. But now, Vohra has a solid list of coping mechanisms at his disposal.

Protocol caught up with Vohra in November 2020 to talk about how to run a remote company, but we wanted to hear his personal productivity tips too. Below are some of the ways Vohra and other folks at Superhuman stay on top of their work. If you want some tips on how to manage your email using Superhuman, Vohra compiled nine of them here.

Stay in the flow: meditate, inbox zero, switch log

Flow is Vohra’s preferred term for uninterrupted, focused work. It’s a state of mind where work feels like play. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

“We stop thinking about ourselves, we’re fully absorbed,” Vohra said when describing flow. “There’s a complete distortion of temporal experience. Moments can either stretch out to infinity or hours can fly by in what feels like minutes.”

It sounds magical. But it’s also hard to attain during a workday filled with constantly competing priorities: email, Slack messages, Zoom calls. Vohra has a few daily rituals he completes to best set himself up for flow. First, he meditates. This helps him clear his mind and do his most creative work.

Second, he makes sure to hit Inbox Zero, in other words, keeping his email inbox empty at all times. The goal is to reduce distraction and clean up a cluttered, overflowing inbox. Productivity expert Merlin Mann coined the term in the early 2000s, and it took the tech world by storm. Hitting Inbox Zero is one of Superhuman’s key selling points.

Vohra’s third daily ritual is the switch log. Vohra has a private Slack channel that he messages in every time he starts a task, switches a task and takes a break. He included an example of the technique on the Superhuman blog in 2020. Sometimes he’ll log tasks retroactively, or edit Slack messages when he accidentally starts doing one task over another. The practice grew from a question often asked of tech leaders: Do you know how you spend your time? Vohra found that his calendar didn’t really give an answer. So he started logging his time each day. “Your calendar records what you thought would happen; your switch log records what actually happened,” Vohra said.

“What you can then do is at the end of every week, analyze that data,” Vohra said. “So I then compare my ideal week to where my time is actually going and I can start to use rules of thumb.”

Stagger your company calendar

The Superhuman workplace is geared toward keeping everyone in flow as much as possible. One practice the company has adopted is a staggered calendar. Most people have inefficient calendars, Vohra said, where meetings are randomly scheduled throughout the week with little time for uninterrupted work. In his other role as an angel investor, Vohra recommends CEOs stack their meetings on specific days.

For example, if you’re the CEO of a mid-sized company (100-200 people), hold your team meetings on Wednesday. Stack your 1:1s on Tuesday. Ask the people who report to you to hold their team meetings on Tuesday and their 1:1s on Monday. And so on for the people underneath them.

The staggering helps information flow through a company more quickly, and creates a faster timeline for solving problems. Problems might come up during 1:1s on Monday, be addressed in team meetings on Tuesday or, if necessary, be addressed at the company meeting on Wednesday. “It takes at most two days for information to travel,” Vohra said. “In many companies, I'm seeing very important information traveling as slow as one week or two weeks.”

In this formation, companies have the majority of Monday and Wednesday and all of Thursday and Friday for deep work.

Harness active procrastination, banish passive procrastination

Procrastination is one of the biggest barriers to the elusive flow state of work. Vohra separates the phenomenon into two elements: passive procrastination and active procrastination. Passive procrastination is the “dangerous” one, he said. You’re working on a task, but feel the impulse to turn away for a quick dopamine rush from some other activity. Like frittering your time on Twitter when you’re supposed to be filing a story, for example (cough cough).

“If you’re feeling indecisive, if you’re trying to make deals with yourself, I’ll do this thing and then I’ll get this reward,” Vohra said, “That’s how you know you’re passively procrastinating.”

Active procrastination is when you consciously decide to direct your energy to another task on your to-do list. “The difference between this and passive procrastination is it's actually a useful task, it's a project that you at some point were wanting to do anyway,” Vohra said.

When it comes to passive procrastination, Vohra encourages mindful curiosity. Acknowledge your discomfort, and think about the consequences of watching the new "Bridgerton" season 2 trailer. Will it be fun? Yes, but just for a moment. Before you know it, you’ll go down a rabbit hole of other movie trailers on YouTube. Then you’ll be stressed because 30 minutes have passed and you still haven’t written your story. (This is hypothetical, I promise.)

“Visualize what it would be like to go make a coffee and visualize what it would be like to actually get to Inbox Zero,” Vohra said. “The guilty pleasure of procrastination will actually seem less attractive.”

Active procrastination, on the other hand, can be powerful. Vohra claims that everything he’s been able to do in his career is due to harnessing active procrastination. The idea here is to go with the flow, and follow your mind’s impulse to complete another useful task. It’s “quite literally listening to your body,” Vohra said.

Completing another task, like folding your laundry, might lead to creative thinking that can help you with your original task.

Make decisions quickly

Superhuman uses a “hyper efficient decision-making process,” Vohra said. He found that meetings were rather inefficient in the early days of the company. Certain issues got all the airtime, while others fell by the wayside. To encourage efficient meetings and fast decision-making, Vohra uses a three-step process.

First, if somebody wants to raise an issue at a team meeting, they must write it down and share it with the team by 6 p.m. the day before the meeting. Team members get the gist quicker, as people can read faster than they can speak.

Second, if someone wants to comment on an issue at the team meeting, they must have read and commented on the document beforehand. This saves time, as people are required to come to the meeting prepared if they want to speak.

Third, if a decision is not reached within five minutes, the conversation stops and the team identifies a decision-maker. Superhuman uses Jeff Bezos’ method when thinking about decisions. For reversible decisions, anyone other than the CEO (Vohra) should be the decision-maker. Vohra is the decision-maker for irreversible decisions.

To actually make decisions, Superhuman uses Bain’s RAPID framework for the five roles involved in any decision (Recommend, Approve, Perform, Input and Decide). The decision-maker gathers all the necessary information to make a decision before the next meeting.

“Since everyone is always up to speed and each person takes at most five minutes, in one hour, you can get through as many as 10 decisions with plenty of room for fun and banter,” Vohra said.

Though Vohra’s all about saving time, he recognizes the value of fun chatter during a meeting. At Superhuman, each team meeting starts with employees sharing one amazing thing that happened to them during the week. We all need some positive energy in order to be our most productive selves.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins