The average professional spends 3 hours or more in their inbox every day.
When email feels overwhelming, productivity suffers: critical tasks get buried, stress levels soar, and focus gets fragmented.
Inbox Zero is a powerful productivity system that turns your inbox into a focused to-do list. In a recent Superhuman Mail virtual event, Megan Wookey, Chief of Staff, and Lily Hennes, Productivity Expert, spoke about the rituals and workflows that help maintain Inbox Zero and save hours every week.
Here are the highlights:
The power of simple rituals
Before diving into the Inbox Zero system in Superhuman Mail, Megan spoke about rituals and productivity.
Consistent rituals can help you and your team achieve clarity, calm, and proactivity. And rituals can have a ripple effect, driving productive rhythms across teams and the whole organization.
Megan completes the same routine every morning to start the day, which involves:
- Identifying top priorities
- Checking calendars (her own and the CEO, Rahul's)
- Getting to Inbox Zero in both email and Slack
And at the end of each day, she has a similar ritual to wrap up:
- Meeting and task follow-ups
- Prepare priorities and tasks for the following day
- Getting to Inbox Zero in both email and Slack
Megan finds that her personal rituals give her a clear head and the ability to be proactive instead of reactive — a crucial responsibility for a Chief of Staff.
Team rituals are a powerful multiplier of personal rituals. Megan has helped build the rituals that keep the Superhuman Mail team aligned, fast, and focused on deep work.
She shared a few examples:
Monday Morning Updates
Leaders share async email updates to ground the team in goals and results, typically including progress updates on OKRs, wins, highlights, and priorities for the upcoming week.
Meeting Outcomes
Every single meeting has clear outcomes listed directly in the calendar invite.
Friday Wins
Every Friday, the whole company celebrates progress and ties work back to customers' experience.
These rituals have earned their place in Superhuman Mail's culture, defining how the team works and wins, as well as how it remains tied to its mission, outcomes, and customer impact.
What makes team rituals stick? Megan shared three takeaways:
- Small rituals create big results
- Anchor everything in outcomes
- Keep it simple
The key insight: simplicity drives adoption. The most powerful rituals are simple, repeatable, and capable of compounding into major productivity gains over time.
What is Inbox Zero?
Inbox Zero transforms your inbox into a focused to-do list.
Inbox Zero can also be a foundational ritual for team productivity. It's precisely one of those simple, repeatable habits that ripples across the team and quickly compounds into extra focus, effortless alignment, and hours saved.
The goal is less about having zero emails and more about the process of getting to zero. That process ensures everything in your inbox view has a clear plan of action, and everything else is out of your way.
When you process your inbox effectively, you eliminate the constant mental drain of wondering what you're missing. You stop scrolling through hundreds of emails trying to remember what needs your attention. You gain clarity on what actually matters today.
This means you can open your inbox and immediately see what needs to be done — without the noise, without the stress, and without critical tasks getting buried.
The Inbox Zero workflow
Lily showed how it works.
First, process emails without responding to any of them. For each email, ask: Is this something I need to do today, on a different day, or am I done with it?
As you consider each email, you'll take one of three actions in Superhuman Mail:
- Today: Hit J to leave the email in your inbox as part of your to-do list
- Different day: Hit H to set a reminder. The email moves to your Reminders folder and returns to your inbox when it’s time to handle it
- Done: Hit E to save to your Done folder, where emails are saved forever and fully searchable
Work from top to bottom. When you finish triaging, what remains is a clear, focused task list for the day.
Respond faster with Superhuman Mail & AI
Once you've completed this process, you can take action on what's left in your inbox.
In Superhuman Mail, AI, keyboard shortcuts, and other features help you fly through your email twice as fast as before.
Lily showed the following features in action:
Auto Summarize
Hit I to see a bullet-point summary of any email thread, giving you instant context.
Write with AI
Press Cmd+J (Mac) or Ctrl+J (Windows) and jot down a few phrases. Superhuman AI will draft a response in your voice and tone, complete with the level of detail you specify. It even adapts its style to each recipient.
Share Availability
Hit Cmd+Shift+A or Ctrl+Shift+A to view your schedule alongside your recipient's calendar. Select available times, and Superhuman Mail inserts a live booking link directly into your email — handling different time zones automatically.
Auto Drafts
When an email needs a response but you haven’t heard back yet, Superhuman Mail automatically writes a follow-up draft and reminds you. Just review and send.
Snippets
Hit ; (semicolon) to instantly insert saved templates with variables, CC/BCC recipients, and meeting links.
Instant Reply
Hit Tab to respond with pre-written replies drafted by AI — perfect for quick acknowledgments.
Ask AI
Hit ? to use Ask AI, an inbox assistant that can pull information from your inbox, calendar, and the web. It can draft replies using context from your email history, summarize multiple threads, and even schedule meetings.
Start fresh with Get Me to Zero
If you fall out of the Inbox Zero habit, give yourself permission to reset.
Hit Cmd+K or Ctrl+K and type Get Me to Zero. Superhuman safely clears older emails into your Done folder, giving you a fresh start while still saving everything.
Choose how many weeks of email to keep in your inbox. You can keep all unread emails if needed, and you have 7 days to undo the action if you change your mind, via Cmd+K or Ctrl+K → Bulk Actions.
Get Me to Zero is a pressure release valve when things pile up. Use it when you need it, and get back on track.
Your Inbox Zero challenge
Getting to Inbox Zero isn't about perfection. It's about making space for what matters.
The challenge? Try Inbox Zero and experiment with a fundamental shift in your relationship with email. When your inbox is under control, you can step away from it with confidence and focus on connecting with customers, spending time with family, or deep work with your team.
Ready to save 4+ hours a week with the most productive email app ever made?