# What your inbox costs a working carer

> What a working carer's inbox costs in hours and dollars a year: a parent's appointments, the surgery, a full-time job. Full maths and assumptions shown.

Canonical: https://beemy.co/inbox-cost/for/working-carers/ · Last updated: 2026-10-17

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.

5 min read

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](https://beemy.co/the-numbers) for how we picked it.

Your numbers

Per year

Show the maths

## Where these numbers come from — no black box.

### The time

Hours/day × working days = hours/week on email. Add recurring reports and newsletter/news reading, then multiply by 52 weeks. No hidden multipliers.

### The $40/hr starting point

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.

### The 60% reclaim

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.

### The 20% review share

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](https://beemy.co/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](https://beemy.co/blog/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](https://beemy.co/the-numbers).

Where the hours go

## A working carer's week runs on four repeating jobs, split between the inbox and a parent's own admin behind it.

### The sibling thread that never resolves

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.

### The care agency that's gone quiet

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.

### The appointment that lands mid-meeting

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.

### The reschedule that eats an evening

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.

Last updated 17 October 2026