In Silicon Valley, some say that the app Superhuman is the next frontier of work. However, its principle is not as futuristic as one might expect; there's no quantum, blockchain, metaverse, or whatever.
ADVERTISEMENTMy Wildest Prediction is a podcast series from Euronews Business where we dare to imagine the future with business and tech visionaries. In this seventh episode, Tom Goodwin talks with Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman, about the future of work.
From the first "@" to office staple
In the early days of instant communication, there was a clear issue: how to designate the destination of a message within a computer network?
American computer programmer Ray Tomlinson found the solution in the "@" symbol. Before email, "@" was primarily a separator in pricing and unit measures. However, Tomlinson repurposed it to designate both the user and their destination host.
This innovation enabled message exchange between computers on ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, laying the foundation for email communication in the 1970s.
Since then, email has evolved from a revolutionary invention to an indispensable tool in daily work life.
"I spend my first hour doing email," recently confessed Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in a podcast. "And I'm pretty religious about doing this."
He is not alone. On average, we spend three hours per day reading and writing emails, consuming almost one-third of our workday, according to a McKinsey report.
"It's hard to find a bigger problem in the business world than that," says Rahul Vorha, CEO of Superhuman.
Part of the problem is the way email is organised, forcing continuous activity changes by prioritising the latest arrivals.
"If you reply in the order that emails appear, your brain is constantly switching gears," Vohra explains. "You're alternating between brief acknowledgments and in-depth replies. You're flipping from updating your team to replying to your mom."
This constant context-switching takes a toll on our mental health. "It actually takes our brain about 20 minutes to recover and to get back to full efficacy," points out Vohra.
These challenges, combined with the rise of new chat apps designed to optimise company communications, lead some to claim that email is outdated.
But Vohra disagrees: "In the future, and this may sound crazy, we'll all still be emailing, and we'll actually stop using tools like Slack and Teams."
Why email is still the future
Vohra argues that instant chat apps can decrease our productivity and erode our well-being.
"If I were to show you my Slack this morning, you would see multiple pages of unread channels," he shares. "Each one of those channels would contain dozens of topics, all jumbled and interspersed with each other."
Unlike chat apps, which disrupt users' workflow with constant notifications popping up on screens, urging them to get an instant reply, email operates asynchronously and silently. Because it is considered "outdated," it is less invasive.
"I've been living in Silicon Valley long enough to know that this is actually all kind of by design," says Vohra. "It is to keep us addicted to the hamster wheel of continuously checking Slack or Teams."
Priced at $30 per month, Superhuman is an app that simplifies the email experience by automating tasks such as drafting, organising, and scheduling.
ADVERTISEMENT"Our average user saves four hours every single week," claims Vohra.
How? It emphasises the efficient use of keyboard shortcuts to accelerate the email experience.
Any "email killer"?
Announcements proclaiming the death of email have recurred over the last decade, with apps like Slack being dubbed the "email killer."
However, email appears to be healthier than ever. More than 300 billion emails are sent every day around the world, and this number continues to increase annually, according to data from Statista.
"I think in the next few years, we will see this massive reinvestment in email and task management and in the core fundamentals of productivity and collaboration," claims Vohra.
ADVERTISEMENTAccording to him, this is how that future will look:
"Imagine dictating just a few ideas of an email into your phone and having that email fully written for you, effortlessly and in your own voice and tone."
