Beemy · beemy.co
Printed from beemy.co/inbox-cost/for/working-carers/
Calculator · Working carers
The GP surgery, the pharmacy and a sibling thread all arrive while you're at your desk, and only the evenings are free to deal with them. Start from a working carer's week below, then move every slider until it matches yours.
Starting point: Working carers
This is a starting point, not a measurement of any real carer's time. The job runs on Gmail like anyone else's. A parent's appointments, calls and forms come on top, and many fall outside a normal inbox entirely. Every slider below is yours to move. See the numbers for how we picked it.
Your numbers
Per year
Show the maths
Hours/day × working days = hours/week on email. Add recurring reports and newsletter/news reading, then multiply by 52 weeks. No hidden multipliers.
A placeholder for the value of your time, yours to adjust. Move the slider to match your own rate, and the rest of the maths follows it.
Triage (read, classify, decide, draft a first pass) is repetitive and depends on context. It needs little judgement. In most inboxes we have looked at in early beta, it is most of the time. The remaining share is judgement calls that still come back to you. This is our own working assumption, not a measured industry figure. We have not yet published usage data from our own beta to replace it.
We have not measured this figure. Every draft waits for a one-tap review until its category earns level 2. Only four categories can ever reach auto-send: meeting_confirmation, scheduling_ack, simple_ack and routing_filing. See /what-you-still-do for the full case. Twenty percent is our own guess at what that ongoing review costs you. It is not a study. Move the slider to your own number; this default exists to be replaced. See what you still do for the full case.
Want the deeper argument for why triage (not raw hours) is the real cost? Read the real cost of email overload.
Sources & assumptions: the 117-emails-a-day figure above is Microsoft WorkLab's own 2025 telemetry. The 60% reclaim rate is our own assumption, not a citation. So is the 20% review share we subtract back out. So are the starting numbers for every preset. Every number this calculator uses, sourced or assumed, is on /the-numbers.
Where the hours go
An email thread among siblings about a parent's care turns into forty replies before anyone decides anything. Reading the whole thread to find the one thing it needs from you eats into a lunch break. One clear answer, sent early, would have closed it before it spiralled that far.
A rota query or a request to the agency sits unanswered, and chasing it feels like one more thing on an already full plate. A short, polite nudge usually gets a reply within the day. Sending it costs almost nothing, next to the alternative of wondering.
A message from the surgery or the pharmacy always seems to land while you're already in something else at work. Working out whether it clashes with your own calendar means stopping what you're doing to check. A flag raised the moment it's booked would save that interruption entirely.
A parent's appointment moves, and sorting it out means a call to the surgery on top of everything else that evening already holds. None of it is hard, only slow, and it always seems to land on the busiest night. A reply drafted and ready would turn that call into one approval.
Read next
Beemy is in private beta. We send invites in rolling batches. We cannot promise a date. When your invite arrives, connect Gmail. Beemy sorts your inbox in that first session.
You're in the hive. You get no email now. We write to you once, when your invite is ready.
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To join the waitlist, go to beemy.co/waitlist.