How Superhuman Mail uses AI to achieve Inbox Zero (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Garrick, and today we're partnering with Superhuman Mail, part of the Superhuman Productivity Suite, to see how their AI can keep your inbox clean, streamline communication, and help you stay up-to-date on all of your messages. We all have very justified frustrations with email, like how searching and organizing never seem to work. For me, the worst is when I forget about important conversations because things get buried in my inbox. In the time I've spent with Superhuman Mail, I've found it removes the frustration and lightens my mental load while making sure that nothing slips through the cracks. Let's take a look at my inbox. Now, this is my inbox. The reason we're just seeing a background image is because my inbox is completely empty. Superhuman Mail is designed around the Inbox Zero strategy. You don't have to use Inbox Zero, but just seeing how it works is a great way to get started. You're probably starting with something like this, hundreds or thousands of messages already in your inbox. I'll go to the Settings menu and choose Get Me to Zero. Superhuman Mail actually prompts you to do this when you first get set up, but you can run this at any time. It will take everything older than a certain period of time and mark all those messages as done, giving you a clean starting point. After that, addressing the rest of these messages will be a breeze. We'll do that in a moment. And don't worry, those messages we just cleared away have not been deleted. I can jump over to the Done folder at any time, and everything that I marked as done is there. It's nice that I can still find everything here, but the important thing is that Superhuman Mail's AI can surface anything from your Done folder or from the Inbox or the Sent folder or any other folder. So you can focus on what you need to get done, not a chronological list of messages. Recently, I was dealing with a series of emails about an outreach event my company was planning. There were a ton of messages flying around, and trying to find anything about that event was overwhelming. Now I can use Ask AI to surface the information I'm looking for. When you ask questions, they don't have to be full sentences. I use a lot of quick sentence fragments, something like, status of the volunteer day event. And it gives me a summary from all my messages and calendar appointments that relate to that event, including direct links to those messages and events. You can ask about a specific topic, about a specific person, or just ask something like, what do I need to follow up on? This is a great way to not only get a summary of everything you might have missed or haven't replied to yet, but it's also an easy way to turn a messy Inbox into clear, actionable next steps. Of course, your email and calendar are tightly connected, but jumping back and forth between them can break focus and waste time. Without losing track of the context of what I'm working on here, Ask AI can help me understand when I last connected with my teammates for this project. It can search through all of my messages or my calendar events to find this information. It could ask it more questions about that meeting, but I think it's time I scheduled a check-in. So I can tell the AI to set something up next week, something in the morning. It can schedule the appointment and send the invite. All you have to do is approve it or ask the AI to make changes. Now, we haven't finished with the calendar. There are still some pretty great tricks waiting for us, but I want to see those as I'm screening the rest of the messages in my Inbox. The next step in that Inbox Zero strategy is to quickly read and reply to new messages as they come in. First, open up a message you want to read. You can hit the Return key or click the Reply button and write your response. If you need some writing help, this is another job for the AI assistant. You can describe the draft you want, but the AI can handle much more than simple drafts. I'll also ask it to schedule a meeting and find information from my other messages to decide when to schedule the meeting. Now I've got the draft, and in the AI panel on the left, I've also set up a meeting invitation that I can send from here. This required research and decision-making. Back in my Inbox, I'll open another message. On this message, I see the AI has already composed an autodraft. It saw that this person was asking to set up a meeting, it drafted a response, and even found an open time in my calendar to propose the meeting. Superhuman Mail learns your writing style so these autodrafts will match your voice. Of course, you can discard an autodraft and write something else, or if you like that draft, you can just send it. In the Settings menu, there are configuration settings for autodraft, so you can set how and when they work. Let's look at another way to reply and schedule a meeting. Imagine I'm working with a prospective sales client on a tight timeline. The thread is full of details and questions, and the fastest way to make progress is to get time on the customer's calendar. Instead of manually proposing times or opening your calendar to coordinate schedules, you can reply to the message and create a booking page. To make the page, you'll need to set your general availability. The AI will account for any other meetings you already have scheduled. Then give your booking page a name and set your preferred meeting duration. Send the response when you're ready, and your recipient can click that link and pick a time that works for them based on your real availability. This helps meetings happen that much faster while still giving you control over the times people can book with you. And if we switch over to the calendar, we see that booking page has been saved. You can reuse it in other messages in the future, or you can also make new booking pages here or delete pages you're not using. Once I've read and replied to messages, to keep my inbox clean, I'll mark them as done. Use the arrow keys to land on a message, then hit the letter E on the keyboard to mark it as done, or click the Done button on a message. Those messages disappear and move to the Done folder. I'll open another message. Now, this one is kind of long, so I'll hit I on the keyboard, and the AI gives me a summary. I'll hit I again to close the summary. Now, this email is important, but not for today. Sometimes I just need a message to get out of the way, and I'll come back to it later. So I'm not going to reply to it, and I'm not going to mark it as done. Instead, I'll hit H on the keyboard or click the Reminder button. In the command panel, the AI asks when I want the reminder. I might type something like two hours. Now, back in my inbox, that message is gone. Messages that you delay go to the Reminders folder. This message will come back to my inbox in two hours. There's one last message in my inbox, so I'll set a reminder for that one. I'll have more time to handle this on Friday afternoon. And now I've reached Inbox 0. I know that I've handled everything, and my email stress is way down. Now, I don't need to tell you that there's more to organizing email than quickly triaging everything down to Inbox 0. In the past, my inbox was full of messages from real people, mixed with messages from mailing lists, information about subscriptions, and a lot of other automated messages that I don't want to waste time reading or sorting. Superhuman Mail uses a split inbox. Above your messages, the Important tab generally shows messages you've received from real people. The Other tab is where you'll find marketing emails and other automated messages. So the messages I typically don't need to read are already sorted separately. From the Settings menu, there are controls for the split inbox. You can turn it off if you want, or even better, you can add more. There's a library of templates, or you can make your own. I do a lot of contract work for one specific company, so I can set up a split inbox and tell it to put every message that comes from that company's domain into that box. Now when messages come in from people in that company, they land in that dedicated inbox. Now that I'm doing a lot more freelance work, I can keep split inboxes for each of my major clients. But for now, I'll remove that new split inbox. Another option is to use labels. When my inbox has an inquiry from a new client right next to an email about an invoice, followed by something else that has nothing to do with my business at all, I get distracted pretty easily. But the AI in Superhuman Mail can apply labels automatically to help me identify different types of messages at a glance. You can also use these labels to find messages in a search later. In my other inbox, it's already applied the marketing label to some messages. And in the Settings menu, you can set up your own auto-labels, configure something new, or use a template. I've been using the template for invoices. That applies a label automatically to all emails related to billing. When a new message comes in that matches the criteria, I see it already has that label in the inbox. And once you have some automatic labels set up, you can leverage them to automatically archive messages that you don't want to see. In the Settings menu, you'll find the setup for auto-archive. You can choose specific labels, or even specific people that you never want to see. These will be archived, so you'll never even see them in your inbox. Of course, those messages won't be deleted. There's an automatic folder for those as well. Finally, let's circle back to the Reminder feature, which is essential for making sure I follow up on important conversations. Earlier, we asked the AI to set reminders on some messages so I could clear them from my inbox. At any time, you can go to the Reminders folder to check on the messages you've delayed. But in my main inbox, I can see that one of those messages has come back. When the reminder time comes, those messages are brought back to the inbox. So now that I have more time, I can focus on this message. Superhuman Mail is helping me clean my inbox, sort my messages, and still make sure I don't miss anything. It's already making my email feel less overwhelming. And Superhuman Mail has set up a link where you can try everything we've seen here free for one month. To get set up, just go to superhuman.com slash garrick.