Seventy-seven emails. Before the workday was over.

That was the number my managing director saw when I shared my screen during a Teams call. She wanted to understand my daily workflow. I showed her my live inbox instead. She went quiet in a way that said more than any response would.

I'd stopped being surprised by the volume a long time ago. That's the thing about ops: you normalize the noise until the noise is just your job description. Dope system, right.

But here’s what I hadn’t done: the math.

I ran an audit on my workspace over five consecutive days. Sixty-five separate actionable items moved through my operations layer in that window. Eighty percent were email. The rest were Teams messages and voicemails, the remote-work equivalent of someone appearing in your doorway asking if you have a minute. Except there’s no door.

Dr. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine studies how we interact with technology. Her research found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to deep focus after a single interruption.

Apply that to 77 emails in an eight-hour workday — one interruption roughly every six minutes — and something clarifies fast. Deep work wasn’t something I was failing to protect. It was something the structure made mathematically impossible.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Because ops people are conditioned to absorb. The work is invisible when it’s going well. Nobody notices the onboarding running clean or the document requests handled before anyone had to follow up. They notice when something drops. So you stay available. You stay reactive. You start mistaking exhaustion for work ethic.

I did. For an embarrassingly long time, honestly.

What the audit gave me wasn’t just data. It gave me language. I started calling it the attention tax: the 70 percent of my week absorbed by rapid-fire client communication, document requests, and leadership follow-ups. That left 30 percent for core execution: the proposals, the onboarding architecture, the strategic work that actually moves the firm.

And here’s the catch-22 that will be familiar to anyone who runs operations: the only way out of the reactive trap is to build better systems. But building better systems requires exactly the kind of deep, uninterrupted focus the reactive trap makes unavailable.

You can't think your way out of a structure. You have to build your way out. (I did not want this to be the answer.)

So that’s what I’m doing: slowly, imperfectly, publicly. I’m taking a Google Gemini certification to understand the architecture behind these tools, not just the outputs. I’m stumbling through Lovable prototyping something specific: an interactive workflow checklist that replaces the scattered Word documents we’ve been living in. A cockpit, not a pile of paper. Something that holds my place when a Teams call lands in the middle of a client onboarding.

AI isn’t the thesis. The audit is.

The tools only matter because the data made visible what I’d been absorbing as normal. And once you can name the structure, you can actually do something about it.

Seventy-seven emails. I’m not managing that number down. I’m building something that means the number stops managing me.

go deeper.

The Gloria Mark research cited here comes from a 2008 Gallup interview — worth reading in her own words. Her book Attention Span (2023) is the full picture if you want the architecture behind the data.

If you want to audit your own inbox before you build anything, start there. The data will tell you more than the feeling ever will.