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Calculator · Working parents
Two inboxes that can't mix, a class newsletter forty replies deep, and appointments that always land mid-afternoon. Start from a working parent's week below, then move every slider until it matches yours.
Starting point: Working parents
This is a starting point, not a measurement of any real parent's time. Two inboxes leave less clear time for email. The class newsletter and other recurring reading add more. A work-only figure would miss them. 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
School forms, a friend's message and old receipts pile up behind the work inbox all week. By the time there's a spare minute, none of it is sorted and the backlog keeps growing. Filing the routine stuff on its own would leave only the two or three messages that need a reply.
A child's party goes out to twenty families, and by the week before, half of them have not answered. Working out who is still missing means going back through every reply. Chasing only the missing names turns that into one short message.
A household bill sits somewhere between the class newsletter and a dozen other things marked urgent. Nobody notices it's close to a late fee until the reminder finally cuts through the noise. A flag raised a few days early is all it takes to avoid the fee entirely.
The school newsletter, the class group and the sports team all post updates on their own schedule. Reading each one properly most evenings is its own small, unpaid job. One tidy summary of what changed would give those evenings back.
Read next
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