Email Is Harder Than You Think

Most email is quick admin work. A small, gnarly segment is focus-block work in disguise, and failing to budget for it is why your inbox keeps winning.

Email Is Harder Than You Think

Most people treat email like it’s the easy part of the day, but it’s sneakily one of the more taxing things you might do.

When you scroll social media or read an article, you’re consuming. It’s a low-obligation, low-consequence activity because you usually don’t have to decide anything, respond to anyone, or track a single open loop.

When you write a proposal or work through a strategy doc, you’re producing. It’s high effort but coherent, with one context, one goal, and one thread to hold.

Email is neither of those things.

The Third Category of Work

Every message you open starts a sequence of context and content shifts. You figure out who this person is and what they actually need. You decide what the right response is — and often, whether now is even the right time to give it. Then you write it in a way that moves things forward.

And then you do it again, with a different person, a different project, and different stakes, sometimes within the same minute.

Most of those decisions resolve in seconds. Newsletters can be skimmed or archived, meetings can be accepted or declined, and (truly) quick questions can be answered quickly.

That’s genuine admin work, and it’s what admin blocks are built for.

But a small segment of emails can’t be resolved that way. They’re the ones that trigger “okay, I need to actually think about this one.” Back in 2009, I called these Jumbos, but that name doesn’t work because it hints at the size of the email. We’ve all gotten the “quick question” emails that were anything but quick, sometimes precisely because of how short and vague the emails were.

Gnarly is the better word here when we take it in its strict sense rather than the slang sense. Gnarly emails are knotted and tangled, and it takes a bit to sort what’s going on in them before you can even start answering. I mean for gnarly to be neutral rather than bad, too. Some of the gnarliest messages in your inbox are ones that you might actually be excited about and it’s gnarly precisely because you desperately want it to land well.

A gnarly email requires focused, sustained attention to process. It’s the kind of work that requires focus block energy.

The trick is that you can’t reliably tell which is which from the subject line. Processing your email is how you find out what you’re actually holding. Which means the gnarly ones can ambush you. They surface in the middle of an admin block, cost ten times what you budgeted, and either blow up the block or get deferred. Deferred enough times, they become the pile.

Five Emails Is Not Necessarily Five Quick Tasks

People count typing time. They don’t count the thinking time before every response, the decision ambiguity when the right answer isn’t obvious, or the relational weight that comes with communication that actually matters.

A two-minute read can easily turn into a 20-minute response. Figuring out what to say, to whom, and at what level of detail is real cognitive work, and catching three to five of those in a sitting puts you at 60–100 minutes of actual labor. That’s a focus block’s worth of effort, whether or not you scheduled one. This is also how a two-minute check can displace a whole focus block.

Inboxes don’t pile up because people are lazy. They pile up because email is harder than it looks, and most people haven’t budgeted for what it actually takes.

You’ve Been Context-Switching Since You Woke Up

It gets worse when you look at how most people actually do email: not in contained blocks but in constant checks throughout the day. Studies from Gloria Mark and others put the average at somewhere between every 6 and 11 minutes.

That matters because Mark’s research also found that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully return to the task you were on. You don’t just lose the time you spent on the email. You lose the re-entry time too.

Do that math across a full workday and it stops looking like occasional interruptions. And before you blame notifications: Mark also found we self-interrupt about as often as we’re interrupted. Most people are in a near-continuous state of context switching from the moment they open their inbox in the morning. The mild brain fog that sets in by early afternoon and the feeling that you worked hard but can’t point to much are dozens of incomplete cognitive resets, compounding. Even when you get through them, the Zeigarnik effect kicks in, and the incomplete cognitive resets become open loop your brain crunches on long after the email session.

This is also why keeping your to-do list in your inbox makes things worse. Every time you open your inbox to see your list, you re-enter the reactive state.

Why Admin Blocks Are 30–60 Minutes

I’ve written before about admin blocks: those dedicated chunks for processing email, returning messages, and handling the coordination work that keeps everything moving. My standard recommendation is 30–60 minutes.

Part of that has always been about affinity. Most people have low enthusiasm for admin work, and after about an hour they get itchy to do something more engaging. That’s real.

But there’s a second reason I haven’t named until now. Fragmented cognitive load burns out faster than focused cognitive load, because decision fatigue accumulates with every context switch. After 30–60 minutes of rapid-fire switching, response quality drops and avoidance goes up, even if you feel like you could keep going. The admin block has a ceiling because the cognitive cost stacks whether you notice it or not.

Admin blocks work because they’re a container sized to how long anyone can sustain decision work at volume. A gnarly email throws a wrench in the works because it requires shifting into a higher form of cognition.

So when you hit a gnarly one mid-block, don’t muscle through it there. Pull it out and schedule it as part of a focus block.

Sometimes one email is the whole focus block. Sometimes you can batch a few because they’re the same kind of cognitive work in different contexts. For instance, I can usually work through several focused sales emails in one block, because I’m in the same brainspace and the context only has to load once.

Once you’re inside your admin block, the S.T.A.R. method is the fastest way to work through what’s there. It’s built specifically for this kind of high-volume, fragmented processing. You just have to follow through and make sure to dedicate some focus blocks to those gnarly emails.

And, of course, you’ll also need the discipline to not fall into an email admin run when you’re really needing to answer three emails. I sometimes print out the gnarly emails batch write my responses in a text editor precisely so my attention doesn’t get snagged by new incoming emails or the urge to process easier emails when I really need to be knocking out the hard ones.

It’s pretty simple:

1. Do admin email during admin blocks and, if there are gnarly emails, organize them as such to do during a focus block.

2. As a planning factor, plan on at least 20 minutes per gnarly email. This will help you time-size how big your pile is getting, as well as let you know how many focus blocks you’ll need to get through them. Some of them will be shorter if you can just focus on them and others will take longer. The goal here is to find your standard time per gnarly email.

3. Use 1 and 2 to determine your admin block and focus block cadence. Per the usual, if you don’t have enough focus blocks, you can bet that you’re going to have a pile-up. That’s a math problem, not a character problem.

And here’s my standing reminder that simple ≠ easy.

If the block language and displacement are new to you, check out the Productivity Primer. It covers them and other frameworks that will help you be more focused, effective, and fulfilled in your work.