It's 9:40 on a Tuesday night and you're finally writing the product requirements.

Not because Tuesday night is when you do your best thinking. Because it's the first stretch of quiet you've had since 8am. The Slack messages have stopped. Nobody's going to pull you into an "ad hoc" sync. The actual work - the spec, the ticket breakdown, the doc that everyone's been waiting on - can finally happen, eleven hours after the conversation that should have produced it.

Every product person I know lives some version of this. And once you see why, you can't unsee it.

Two jobs, two completely different days

Think about how a software engineer spends a day. They're in front of an IDE. The IDE is a tight loop: write, run, see the result, adjust. The tool is where the work happens, in the moment it happens. Feedback is instant and execution is continuous. That's not an accident - we've spent forty years building tools that collapse the distance between an engineer's intent and a working result.

Now think about how a product manager spends a day. They're in meetings. Back to back to back. The largest surface area of context in a PM's entire week isn't a document or a dashboard - it's the conversations they're sitting in all day long. That's where the decisions get made, the requirements get shaped, the tradeoffs get argued out.

And then... nothing happens to that context. The meeting ends. The richest, most decision-dense hour of your day evaporates into a few bullet points and a vague sense of what you now owe people. The work the conversation implied - the PRD, the Jira tickets, the follow-up, the update to the doc - all of that is still sitting there, undone, waiting for you to go transform it by hand. Later. Always later.

Engineers got a tool that meets them at the moment of work. Product people got a calendar.

The infinite workday is not a vibe - it's measured

I used to think this was just me being disorganized. Then Microsoft put numbers on it in their Work Trend Index research on what they call the "infinite workday," and it turns out it's structural.

The average knowledge worker is now interrupted every two minutes - up to 275 times a day. They're absorbing 153 Teams messages and 117 emails daily. Sixty percent of meetings are ad hoc - they just materialize on your calendar. Meetings after 8pm are up 16% year over year. By 10pm, nearly a third of workers have dived back into their inboxes. One in three people surveyed said the pace of the last five years has made it flatly impossible to keep up.

Read that back. The interruptions own the daylight hours, so the real work gets pushed to the edges — before 9am, after 6pm, on the weekend. The deep work didn't disappear. It got exiled to the only hours nobody else is awake to interrupt you.

That's the part that actually bothers me. We've quietly accepted a deal where the most valuable work a product person does - turning messy conversation into the artifacts that let a team build - is only allowed to happen on stolen time.

So do the work during the conversation

Here's the question that started Earmark, and it's almost embarrassingly simple: if the meeting is where the context already lives, why not produce the work right there?

My co-founder and I spent six years building software for product managers at ProductPlan before it sold in 2022. We lived this problem the whole time. The thing we kept coming back to afterward was that the meeting isn't the overhead - the meeting is the richest input you have. The waste is everything that happens after it: the manual translation, the fidelity you lose with every handoff, the Tuesday nights.

Most AI meeting tools stop at capture. They record, they transcribe, they hand you a summary. But capture is table stakes - and honestly, nobody reads the summary. The whole game is conversion: turning the captured conversation into specific, finished work. Tickets with acceptance criteria. A PRD draft. The follow-up email. The artifact your team is actually waiting on, generated as you talk, not reconstructed at 9:40pm.

The phrase we use internally is "real work, not AI notes." When it's working, people stop treating a meeting as "talk now, document later." The documentation is already happening. You walk out of the conversation and the deliverable is sitting there, ninety percent done, while it's all still fresh.

Meeting you at the moment - and before it

The IDE didn't just give engineers a place to type. It gave them a feedback loop. That's the bar. For product work, "meeting you at the moment" cuts two ways.

There's the live cut: as the conversation happens, the work assembles itself in real time - you can watch a ticket get written and refined by voice while the team is still talking through it. And there's the proactive cut, which is where this gets genuinely fun. If I've got a portfolio review on Friday, I don't want to spend Thursday night building the deck. I want it generated from the week's conversations and waiting for me an hour before the meeting. The context to build it already exists. It's just been trapped in transcripts nobody turns into anything.

That's the future I actually care about: the highest-leverage work a product team does - the epic and PRD authoring that sits between product, design, and engineering - stops being the thing you do on stolen time, and becomes the thing that's already done by the time you look up.

Give the day back

I don't think the answer to the infinite workday is another productivity framework or a sterner Slack-notification policy. The hours are gone because the work got separated from the moment the work was understood. Engineers closed that gap decades ago. Product people never got the tool that does it for them.

The meeting is the moment. That's where I want to meet you.

Not at 9:40 on a Tuesday night.