How to Avoid Burnout with Better Capacity Planning

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back” before. It’s been said that the phrase originated from an Arabic proverb about loading a camel with so much stuff that it can’t move or stand. Our first recorded version of the phrase in English is from a theological debate, of all things, in the 1600s between Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall (an English political philosopher and an Anglican archbishop) where Hobbes wrote “the last feather may be said to break a horse’s back” to make a point about causality. Whatever version of the idiom you prefer, the general message is the same: an excessive burden, even when that excess seems small, can have drastic effects.

Perhaps for small business owners the saying would go along the lines of “the scheduling emails that broke the CEO” (all my CEOs can confirm, email back and forths trying to schedule a meeting between multiple people are exhausting). Rather than ending up with an animal with a broken back, we end up with something equally expensive and inconvenient: burnout.

There’s a chance you’ve heard the word “burnout” so often in pop culture or day-to-day conversation that it’s lost its real meaning. There are some people out there who don’t even believe it exists (usually because their big corporate boss or some hustle culture podcast said so). Although there isn’t an official medical diagnosis for burnout (at least in the US), it’s definitely real. And it can be incredibly detrimental to both your health and the health of your business. Here’s an excerpt from WebMD:

“Burnout is a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped. It happens when we experience too much emotional, physical, and mental fatigue for too long. In many cases, burnout is related to one’s job. But burnout can also happen in other areas of your life and affect your health… Burnout is about too little. Too little emotion, motivation, or care. Stress can make you feel overwhelmed, but burnout makes you feel depleted and used up… Burnout keeps you from being productive. It makes you feel hopeless, cynical, and resentful. The effects of burnout can hurt your home, work, and social life. Long-term burnout can make you more vulnerable to colds and flu.”

Medically Reviewed by Jabeen Begum, MD | Written by WebMD Editorial Contributor

The threat is serious enough that governments all over the world have taken steps towards burnout prevention and burnout treatment. According to an article by HuffPost (formerly called The Huffington Post), Germany, France, the UK, Japan, and other nations have taken steps to either discourage burnout or hold corporations responsible for causing it.

So clearly this is something you want to avoid. But… how?

The answer is capacity planning.

The reason people get burned out is from too much work. Nobody can perform at 110% all the time; most people can probably ride at a solid 70% productivity like 80% of the time (my numbers from observation). The other 20% of time is split between low productivity days (0-45%) and high productivity days (70-100%). Meaning if you’re asking yourself or your team members to perform every day like it’s a high-productivity day, burnout is inevitable. So the trick is to learn what you or your team member’s average daily capacity is, not your max daily capacity, and plan for that. This can be tricky, but it’s a good idea to plan based on tasks. 

For example: 

• If you know from experience that it usually takes your copywriter 2 hours to write a blog and 3 hours to write the social media captions for a month’s worth of content. (Not to mention a few hours for content editing after the initial draft). 
• And you know they can usually work productively about 5 hours a day. 

Then you would assign and pace those tasks accordingly. 

• Instead of asking them to write two blogs and a month’s worth of social media captions in one day (based on the assumption of it taking them 7 hours to complete these pieces of content. You know, well within the default “8-hour work day”…) 
• You would ask them to complete this work across two work days, leaving space for ad hoc tasks that come up and editing.  

This leads to burnout prevention and keeps you from asking yourself or your team members to keep up with an unsustainable schedule. The hope is that by paying attention to how long each task takes someone and how long they can actually work, the energetic cost of each task will be taken into account in your planning and scheduling. 

You will find that each team member’s average daily capacity is different. It’s important to complete capacity planning for each team member based on their specific work style and capacity levels. 

If all of this still feels a little over your head, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. It took me lots of trial and error and lots of practice to get capacity planning right. That’s why we created the Team Capacity Planner & Masterclass and the Solopreneur Capacity Planner & Tracker to help visionary CEOs like yourself. Check out these products and more in the Visionary Vault!