What Parenthood and AI Taught This Productivity Expert About Reclaiming His Time

I'm fascinated with how the smartest people in the world get their work done. That's what Superorganizers is about: seeing all of the little habits that make up a great work day and a great life. Artificial intelligence has changed what it means to be productive and efficient at work, so we decided to revisit some of our favorite interview subjects to understand how their routines have changed in the era of AI models. Recently, we spoke to designer Marie Poulin, newsletter writer Polina Pompliano, former Holloway CEO Andy Sparks, Indistractable author Nir Eyal, and Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler. Today, we’re back with the founder of Superhuman and startup adviser Gaurav Vohra.—Dan Shipper

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Gaurav Vohra believes in getting work done without interruptions. 

As a founding leader and the former head of growth at the email client company Superhuman, he arranged his day to focus completely on one task at a time. Five years ago, when he first spoke to Every, that meant checking his work email just twice each day, and setting clear expectations with colleagues that he might take up to 24 hours to respond to them.

In the years since, Gaurav has become a parent and witnessed the AI revolution take hold. He now spends most of his time advising startups, but he still works with Superhuman, the company he helped build. While he follows many of the same principles, his daily habits have changed. We caught up with Gaurav to explore how becoming a parent has changed his relationship with time, how AI has transformed his workflow, and what productivity lessons he's learned along the way.

What’s changed in life and work since we last spoke in 2020?

I had a child! He's 3-and-a-half now. This massively reduces the amount of free time I have. AI, on the other hand, gives me hours back. I research most of my problems and tasks with the help of ChatGPT.

I'm advising several startups now. Keeping on top of multiple businesses requires that I'm highly efficient with my time.

Congrats! Back then, you were only checking email twice a day. Has that practice changed?

That was for a work email account for a full-time job. Yes, I only checked and processed that email twice a day.

I check my personal email account many more times than twice a day—probably every 1–2 hours—because I am running a separate advising business where responsiveness is very important. But that's a different, newer use case.

The limited email practice works on two assumptions: First, there’s an assumption that  people close to you know how to reach you. 

Second, there’s the assumption that your job success doesn't fundamentally depend on you living in your email. This won't be true for many (e.g., founders raising, recruiters recruiting, salespeople closing). I work for myself now so I need to be in my inbox multiple times a day to drive my own sales funnel and maintain responsiveness.

How has AI changed what you do at work?

AI has drastically shortened the time it takes to do just about any task. My frame of reference is from the world of product and growth.

In growth, it's very common that you need lightweight engineering tasks. For example, you might be migrating 100,000 email addresses from one marketing tool to another, and there's no CSV uploader. It requires interfacing with an API. Before AI it might take a non-engineer up to a few hours of tinkering around with a bash script to figure out the API. Or you could bother an engineer, which disrupts their work. Now, a non-engineer can describe the problem to AI and it will provide a working script in less than one minute.

Additionally, it’s common in product and engineering that you need to research details deeply to grow your knowledge. Before AI, you might spend hours Googling, reading, and synthesizing information. Now, you can ask AI a question and get a detailed answer—and you can then chat back and forth with it to synthesize the information.

Lastly, people typically have a process of writing up decision documents for important decisions, such as risky or one-way choices. Before AI, you’d have to do that from scratch and it could take an hour. Now, you can take the same back-and-forth dialogue and ask AI to produce a decision document that is about 90 percent of the way there again in about a minute.

Okay, so tell me about your inbox.

My favorite applications in email are digesting as well as producing text information. For many emails I receive, I read the AI summary before I read the email itself. This is especially powerful for long emails that you are forwarded, newsletters, and verbose company memos. If I have routine emails to send, I often start with a prompt that describes my intent and I let the AI structure the first version.

What do you think people misunderstand about AI and work?

Folks underestimate just how much AI can speed tasks up. Why? 

AI is evolving at such a blistering pace that it's genuinely challenging to keep on top of the latest capabilities and products, and how they can speed you up.

Folks also under-utilize AI for their work. Why?

You actively need to slow down to understand the latest and greatest, and change your workflow to start using it. Most people are too stuck in their routines to do this.

The labor and talent market moves incredibly slowly. Within companies, performance cycles are typically only every 6–12 months, so a given individual contributor who is not using AI relative to their peers might carry on doing so for months and years before it starts to show up in their relative performance.

It could take years to unseat a big incumbent who is slow at adopting AI. This awareness and adoption gap means that individuals and teams who are ahead of the curve will have a sharp competitive advantage.

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