Most calculators stop at salary × hours. That's the tip. The real bill includes the 23-minute recovery tail, the dead zone before the meeting starts, and prep time across every attendee. Drag the inputs — watch the gap.
Time isn't fungible. A meeting in the middle of a focus window splits it into two shallow blocks — neither long enough for hard problems.
Your meeting didn't cost 30 minutes. It cost your morning.
Gloria Mark's lab at UC Irvine clocked the average refocus cost at ~23 minutes after an interruption. A 30-minute meeting drags ~138 person-minutes of recovery into the rest of the day at six attendees.
Two 90-minute blocks aren't worth one 180-minute block. Hard problems need uninterrupted runway. A meeting in the middle of a focus window doesn't cost its duration — it costs the focus block it bisects.
The 15 minutes before a meeting are dead. People stop starting things they can't finish, refresh their inbox, and watch the clock. The meeting begins long before the calendar says it does.
A real-time counter, paused or stopped on demand. Big enough to project. Screenshot-friendly when it ends.
hourly_rate = (salary × (1 + overhead_pct)) / 2080
direct_cost = attendees × hourly_rate × (duration_min / 60)
context_switch_cost = attendees × hourly_rate × ((recovery + dead_zone) / 60)
prep_cost = attendees × hourly_rate × (prep_min / 60)
per_meeting_true_cost = direct_cost + context_switch_cost + prep_cost
if quality_penalty: per_meeting_true_cost = per_meeting_true_cost / 0.5
occurrences_per_year = { Daily: 250, Weekly: 52, Bi-weekly: 26,
Monthly: 12, One-time: 1 }
annual_cost = per_meeting_true_cost × occurrences_per_year Group polls, booking pages, calendar sync, email-to-calendar — all free, no signup. The fewer meetings on the calendar, the smaller the number on this page.
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Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
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