Your Capacity Is Never What You Think It Is

I've been having this nagging feeling about my consulting practice for months now. Something was missing. I help creative agencies build systems for everything—project management, client communication, team workflows—but there was this blind spot I couldn't quite name.

Then I watched some of our manufacturing clients at The Culture Base implement capacity planning.

And it hit me:

Creative agencies desperately need this, and almost none of us are doing it.

Creative agencies aren't like other businesses. You've got a myriad of tasks happening simultaneously—some requiring deep thought, others that are pure execution. Brand strategy sessions. Client revisions. Project management. Team meetings. Creative concepting. Production work. It's like conducting an orchestra where every instrument has a different timeline, but they all need to end in unison at the same DUE date.

And here's where it gets messy: we're making capacity decisions based on emotional toil rather than actual data. That complex brand strategy feels like it should take 20 hours, so we scope it that way. That "simple" social campaign feels easy, so we squeeze it into the margins. We're guessing. And our guesses are almost always wrong.

When you overcommit your department, your agency, or yourself, you rob yourself of the margin needed to be truly creative and experiment for the right solution. The DUE date arrives, and instead of crafting the perfect solution, you're rushing to produce something. The work becomes subpar—not because your team lacks talent, but because the system sets them up to fail. This is where our "Excellence" value crashes into reality. Good enough is not good enough, but how can we deliver excellence when we've already allocated 110% of our actual capacity?

For the past few months, I've been time tracking every task in my workday. Meetings. Writing. Project management. Coaching sessions. Content creation. Everything. I'm using Harvest, and I'm treating this as pure research—no judgment, no optimization yet, just data collection. Here's what surprised me: most tasks take significantly less time than I thought they would. I've been operating with way more margin than I realized. But I couldn't see it until I started tracking the facts instead of trusting my feelings.

When capacity planning feels right, it's factual. When it feels overwhelming, it's wrong.

We think we know how long things take. We've done this work for years. We're experts in our craft. But we're basing our capacity decisions on gut feelings and emotions that are consistently inaccurate.

The creative who says, "This brand refresh will take me six weeks" is guessing based on how emotionally draining brand work feels. The account manager who says "I can handle five more clients" is guessing based on their current stress level, not their actual available hours.

We're making business decisions—hiring, pricing, scoping, promising—based on guesses. And then we wonder why creative teams burn out, why projects go over budget, and why quality suffers.

Now what?

Start tracking your time. Not forever. Not with the goal of "optimization" or "productivity." Just for research.

Pick a time tracking tool—I'm using Harvest—and track every task for 30 days. Meetings, creative work, admin tasks, everything. Don't change your behavior, just observe it.

Then let's compare notes. What surprised you? What patterns emerged? What did you learn about your actual capacity versus your assumed capacity?

Because I'm convinced that once we start building capacity planning on facts instead of feelings, we'll unlock the margin that makes truly excellent creative work possible.

What are you discovering about your actual capacity? Reply or reach out—I'd genuinely love to hear what you're learning.