Capacity
How much work the business can actually deliver in a period — measured in the constrained resource, not in optimism.
Capacity is the amount of work you can genuinely deliver in a given period. It is measured in whatever is actually scarce — usually senior hours, sometimes a machine, occasionally cash — and it is almost always smaller than the calendar suggests.
The standard error is counting gross hours. A 40-hour week does not contain 40 deliverable hours; it contains selling, invoicing, hiring, the meeting that ran over, and the recovery time after a hard job. Thirty hours of nominal availability commonly yields eighteen of delivery. Planning against the nominal figure guarantees a permanent, structural overcommitment that reads as a personal failing and is arithmetic.
The second error is planning to fill it. A system run at 100% has no absorption, so a single sick day or one late client input pushes everything behind it, and the recovery costs more than the slack would have. Deliberate slack of 15–20% is not waste; it is what keeps a delay local.
Worked: two people, 80 nominal hours a week. Subtract 20 for sales, admin and internal work and 8 for slack: 52 deliverable hours. At an average job of 26 hours that is two jobs a week — not the three the headcount implies, and the gap is where every missed deadline for the last year came from.
Also known as
- available hours
- throughput limit
Relevant for
- Creators
- Your publishing schedule is a capacity plan whether you treat it as one or not; count the hours a piece actually takes, including the ones after you press publish.
- Business owners
- Plan to 80% of deliverable hours, not 100% — a fully booked practice has no absorption, so one late input pushes every project behind it.