Sarah is a composite. She works in finance. She has three children: Ethan, 9. Lily, 7. A toddler who isn't in school yet and is therefore not the subject of this piece. Her husband is also on most of the school distribution lists, in theory. Between Monday and Friday of a normal week in October, her inbox received 142 emails. Of those, 63 came from school-adjacent senders. Of those 63, 11 contained an action item that required her, specifically, to do something by a specific date. The other 52 were informational, congratulatory, or sent by someone who needed a newsletter platform and didn't have one.
The senders
The 63 school emails came from 19 distinct senders. Among them:
- Ethan's homeroom teacher
- Ethan's math enrichment teacher
- Lily's homeroom teacher
- The lower school principal
- The upper school principal (Ethan is technically in lower school, but he gets the upper school newsletter anyway, because someone added him to a list in 2023 and nobody has removed him)
- The PTA
- The PTA fundraising subcommittee
- The PTA auction subcommittee
- The PTA, sending the same email twice because the first one had a broken link
- The soccer coach
- The soccer team parent
- The speech therapy office
- The pediatrician's patient portal
- The aftercare program
- The bus company
- The school photographer
- A man named Greg who runs the chess club
The average length of these emails was 312 words. The longest was 1,847 words, from the PTA auction subcommittee, about a silent auction in March.
The most important email of the week
Tuesday, 2:14 p.m. From Lily's homeroom teacher. Subject: "Quick note about Friday." Buried in paragraph four: picture day had been moved from the following Wednesday to this Friday, and Lily needed to wear something other than the uniform polo, which she had worn in every school picture since kindergarten and which Sarah had been counting on. Sarah read this email Thursday night at 9:50 p.m.
The most useless email of the week
Monday, 11:06 a.m. From the upper school principal. Subject: "A reflection on community." Word count: 1,204. Action items: zero. Mentions of Ethan, who does not attend the upper school: zero. Reason Sarah received it: unclear.
The action items, in case you're curious
1. Sign permission slip for Ethan's field trip to the science museum (due Wednesday). 1. Send nut-free snack for Lily's class on Wednesday. 1. Confirm Ethan's speech therapy moved to Tuesday at 3:15. 1. Pay $40 to the soccer team parent for end-of-season coach gift. 1. RSVP to Lily's classmate's birthday party. 1. Reply to the pediatrician's portal about Ethan's flu shot. 1. Order picture day retakes for Lily (see above). 1. Submit the form for aftercare schedule changes for November. 1. Volunteer slot for the book fair, or don't, but reply either way. 1. Confirm bus stop for the field trip. 1. Read and sign the updated technology use policy. Eleven things. Spread across nineteen senders. Hidden inside 312-word emails about community.
The math
Time required to triage 63 emails manually, assuming Sarah opens each one, reads enough to determine whether there's an action item, flags the action items, and adds them to a list: roughly 84 minutes per week. Most of it happens in two-minute increments between meetings, in the pickup line, on the toilet. Time required with DailyNest: 4 minutes. One briefing, Monday through Friday, in the morning, with coffee. Eleven action items, sorted by kid, with dates. That's 80 minutes a week. Roughly five and a half hours a month. Roughly the length of one parent-teacher conference cycle, returned to her, every month, forever.
The part that isn't in the numbers
Sarah didn't miss picture day. She missed it for years before this. She missed the field trip permission slip in September and had to email the teacher at 7:48 a.m. from the car. She missed the speech therapy reschedule and showed up on the wrong day in August. The 80 minutes is the headline. The picture of Lily in the uniform polo she wasn't supposed to wear is the reason.