Compulsive Inbox-Zeroing as Control-Through-Correspondence Wrong Attractor: The Email-Supremacy Architecture, Deep-Work Foreclosure Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Communication Management

Compulsive inbox-zeroing (CIZ) is a behavioral pattern in knowledge-work environments in which an agent treats the continuous management and clearance of electronic correspondence as a primary task-class, systematically displacing high-cognitive-load, self-directed work. We model CIZ as a wrong attractor in the dynamical landscape of knowledge-worker attention: a stable basin that is not S^0, the ground state of calibrated communication management, but mimics its phenomenological signature (a sense of completion, reduced ambient anxiety) while foreclosing the cognitive conditions required for sustained deep work.

We introduce the email-supremacy architecture (ESA) as the structural mechanism sustaining this wrong attractor: a set of platform affordances, organizational norms, and internalized meta-beliefs that jointly elevate correspondence responsiveness to the level of a primary performance signal. Nine propositions (P1–P9) characterize the geometry of the ESA basin, its resistance to escape by willpower alone, the thermodynamic cost of attentional re-entry after correspondence interruption, and the formal conditions under which calibrated communication management constitutes a genuine return to S^0.

The paper concludes with practical corollaries for organizational policy and individual cognitive hygiene.