Time cost calculator for repetitive tasks
List the tasks you repeat every week, how long each takes, and what an hour of your time is worth. The calculator shows what they cost you in hours, workdays, and dollars a year, so you can decide which ones to hand off first. It runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent or saved.
How the calculation works
Weekly minutes are each task's minutes multiplied by how many times a week it happens, added up across tasks. Yearly hours are weekly minutes divided by 60, times 48 working weeks, which allows for holidays and time off. Yearly cost is yearly hours times your hourly value. Workdays are yearly hours divided by eight.
- Example: email triage at 30 minutes, five times a week, is 150 minutes a week.
- That is 2.5 hours a week, or 120 hours a year.
- At $50 an hour, it costs $6,000 a year, or 15 eight-hour workdays.
What hourly value should you use?
Use what an hour of your time earns or would cost to replace. A freelancer can use their billable rate. An employee can use salary divided by about 2,000 working hours, plus roughly a quarter for benefits and overhead. A founder can use what they would pay someone to do the task, or the rate their most valuable work earns.
Which tasks to hand off first
Sort by yearly hours, then pick the task that is both expensive and easy to check. Good first candidates repeat on a schedule, live in one or two apps, and have a clear finish line.
- Email triage and reply drafts, checked before anything is sent.
- A morning brief from your inbox, messages, and calendar.
- Receipts pulled from email and logged in a spreadsheet.
- Weekly reports copied from one tool into another.
What the number doesn't include
The result is the time the tasks take you today, not a promise of savings. Handing a task to a person or an AI agent still takes time to describe the job and review the work, and some tasks need your judgment every time. Context switching around small tasks often costs more than the minutes themselves, and the calculator doesn't count that.
Use this calculator on your site
You're welcome to link to this calculator from a guide, a newsletter, or a resource list. Copy the link HTML under the calculator. The page stays at this address.
FAQs
Yes. There's no sign-up, and it runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server or stored.
48 weeks allows for about four weeks of holidays and time off. If you work every week, the yearly figures are about 8% higher.
Time it for one week. Start a timer each time you do it and write down the minutes. Estimates from memory usually run low for small, frequent tasks.
Some of them. An agent such as Krafty Bot can do repetitive work in your apps and on a schedule, while you still describe the job and approve anything it sends or changes. Krafty's free plan includes three Bots; Pro is $20 a month for up to 50 Bots, with a 7-day free trial.
Try an AI teammate
Start free with one Bot and one connected app. Pro is $20 a month for up to 50 Bots and 50 hours of computer time. App writes wait for approval unless an eligible rule allows them.