diff --git a/countwords.py b/countwords.py
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..6b231a1b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/countwords.py
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bsoup
+import pandas as pd
+import numpy as np
+import humanfriendly
+
+# Read in email data file
+df = pd.read_csv('../bodytext.csv', header = 0)
+
+# Filter out sent mail 
+emails = df.query('FromEmail != "[my email address]"').copy()
+
+def wordCount(row):
+
+    if(row['Format'] == 'Html'):
+        return htmlWordCount(row['Body'])
+
+    return textWordCount(row['Body'])
+
+def textWordCount(text):
+    if not(isinstance(text, str)):
+        return 0
+
+    return len(text.split(None))
+
+def htmlWordCount(text):
+    if not(isinstance(text, str)):
+        return 0
+
+    soup = bsoup(text, 'html.parser')
+
+    if soup is None:
+        return 0
+
+    stripped = soup.get_text(" ", strip=True)
+
+    [s.extract() for s in soup(['style', 'script', 'head', 'title'])]
+
+    stripped = soup.get_text(" ", strip=True)
+
+    return textWordCount(stripped)
+
+averageWordsPerMinute = 350 
+
+# Count the words in each message body
+emails['WordCount'] = emails.apply(wordCount, axis=1)
+emails['MinutesToRead'] = emails['WordCount'] / averageWordsPerMinute
+
+# Get total number of minutes required to read all these emails
+totalMinutes = emails['MinutesToRead'].sum()
+
+# And convert that to a more human-readable timespan
+timeToRead = humanfriendly.format_timespan(totalMinutes * 60)