The honest arithmetic of a teaching inbox.

Correspondence is a substantial part of the job and is rarely counted as one.

Run the numbers for your own load. Count the messages you send in a week, multiply by a realistic average composition time including the thinking and the rereading, and add the reading and triage of everything that arrives. The total is usually several hours, and for anyone holding a coordination role it is considerably more. That time is real, it is unavoidable, and in most workload models it is invisible, tucked inside the general category of everything else.

Naming it accurately matters for two reasons. First, you stop treating correspondence as an interruption to the real work and start treating it as a portion of the work that deserves technique and a scheduled slot. Second, when workload is discussed with any seriousness, you have something better than a feeling. A specific figure changes conversations that a general sense of being overwhelmed never will.

It also reframes efficiency. If correspondence is hours per week, a change that saves a minute per message is worth genuine effort, whereas at a perceived twenty minutes per week it is not worth thinking about. That is the case for building your own repeatable structures for the messages you send repeatedly: not scripts to paste blindly, but a known shape you can fill quickly and adapt, so the routine ones cost little and the hard ones get the time they need.