Two summit invites landed in my inbox within 24 hours of each other.

I said yes to both before checking my workload planner (this was last month, before I had committed to my word of the year).

You can probably guess how it turned out.

Instead of a quiet three-week break over the holidays (the one I’d planned, blocked off, and fully intended to take)... I spent a big chunk of it prepping for interviews, tweaking my bio, reworking slide decks, and writing emails.

Saying yes without checking your capacity first is how your time disappears.

Because that work has to go somewhere. And where it goes is in all the free time you think you have.

The day you blocked off for marketing efforts? Gone.
Evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks? Eaten up.
That one Friday you wanted to use to catch up on your bookkeeping? Bye.

Not because you’re flaky or unproductive or bad at this whole business thing. It’s because most of us are planning based on fantasy hours.

We think an eight hour workday equals eight hours of getting things done.

But you don’t have 8 hours.

A typical day probably looks more like:

🍽️ 1.5 hours for meals and bio breaks
🙋 2 hours answering questions, responding to pings, and handling unexpected stuff

That leaves only 4.5 hours for delivery, operations, marketing, admin, finance, and strategic planning.

That’s also the bucket we expect to draw from every time we take on a new project. Launch a new offer. Or say yes to an unexpected opportunity.

We tell ourselves we’ll find the time. But we don’t find it. We steal it. From the future version of ourselves who was already busy.

And when we start feeling the pressure and strain from being over committed, we blame the wrong thing.

We say:

“I need to learn how to focus better”
“I have to manage my team better”
“We need to figure out how to be more productive”

Instead of:

"We should automate or eliminate some of our current workload to create space for this"
"This plan is going to require some outside help to complete it”
“We don’t have the capacity for this right now, let’s plan to do it later”

Capacity planning isn’t about saying no to big goals. It’s about designing a business that makes room for them without burning through your nights, weekends, and energy reserves.

Start here:

1. Calculate your real capacity.
   ​Factor in buffer time. The interruptions. The breaks. The “oops that took longer than expected” moments. If you work 9-5, you do not have 8 get-shit-done hours. Stop planning as if you do.
   ​
2. Document your current workload.
   ​Use ClickUp, Asana, Notion, a Google Sheet. Whatever works. Document the work to be done. Estimate how long it all will take. Then track your time so you can see how long it actually takes. That way you can get better at estimating over time.
   ​
3. Check the whole picture before saying yes.
   ​Look at what else you’re already committed to before adding anything new. Strategic planning is just as much about delay and subtraction as it is about doing what’s necessary to reach your goals.

Overall, stop trying to accomplish “big-team” projects with “small-team” bandwidth. That’s a recipe for burnout, not scale.

And remember that every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. Make sure you know what that is.

xo,
Sandra