Beemy · beemy.co
Printed from beemy.co/inbox-cost/for/working-parents/
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
A starting point, not a measurement of any real parent's time: less clear runway for email between two inboxes, plus the class newsletter and other recurring reading a work-only figure would miss. 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 context-dependent rather than judgement-heavy, and it's most of the time in most inboxes we've looked at early in beta. The remaining share is judgement calls that still come back to you. This is our own working assumption rather than a measured industry figure, and we haven't yet published usage data from our own beta to replace it with a real one.
We have not measured this figure. Every draft still waits for a one-tap review until its category earns level 2, and only four categories (meeting_confirmation, scheduling_ack, simple_ack, routing_filing) can ever reach auto-send — see /what-you-still-do for the full case. Twenty percent is our own guess at what that ongoing review still costs you, not a study of it. 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, the 20% review share we subtract back out, and every preset's starting numbers are our own assumptions, not citations. Every number this calculator uses, sourced or assumed, is on /the-numbers.
Where the hours actually 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 just 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 names that are actually missing 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 actually changed would give those evenings back.
Read next
Beemy is in private beta. Join the waitlist and go from connect to a quiet, triaged inbox before you close your laptop tonight.
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