An honest look at load vs. capacity — before the plan, not after the miss.
This is not a productivity score. It's a look at how much value-delivering work your team can realistically produce in a given window — and, more importantly, how much capacity is hiding in plain sight, waiting to be reclaimed. Every number below is yours to change. The point isn't the floor. It's the climb — and the line you shouldn't cross to reach it.
1Your team & window
Start with the raw, on-paper number — the one your current plan is probably built on.
2Where the hours actually go
Not waste — mostly legitimate, necessary, invisible. The plan just never subtracted it. Drag each to your reality; the defaults are honest starting points, applied in sequence.
Time off — PTO, holidays, sick, leave12%
Nobody is on the clock 52 weeks a year.
Admin, email & the general overhead of having a job10%
Real, recurring, and rarely counted as load.
Meetings & coordination (incl. status prep)20%
The most reclaimable bucket in the whole model. Hold this number in mind.
Unplanned work & firefighting15%
Capacity you can't plan against — so it has to be reserved out, not booked over.
Extraneous load — concurrent priorities & interruptions per person iExtraneous load is the reclaimable third kind of cognitive load — the mental tax of context-switching and interruptions imposed by how work is organized, not by the work itself.Unlike intrinsic and germane load (step 2b), this one you can reduce — fewer concurrent priorities and fewer interruptions. 1 = fully focused.3
The reclaimable kind of cognitive load: context-switching and interruptions imposed by how work is organized. 1 = fully focused. (The two kinds you can't reclaim are in the next step.)
2bCognitive load — the nature of the work iCognitive load is the mental effort the work itself demands — not a measure of the worker. Three parts: • Intrinsic — how inherently complex the work is • Germane — how much new learning it requires • Extraneous — friction from how work is organized (you set this one as the switching tax in step 2)Intrinsic and germane are a floor set by the work — they can't be reclaimed by fixing process, and they aren't anyone's fault.
Two kinds of load come from the work itself, not the worker: intrinsic (how inherently complex the task is) and germane (how much new learning it demands). Both lower finished output per hour, both are outside any individual's control — and unlike the extraneous load above, you cannot reclaim them by fixing process. They're the floor the work sets.
3How alive is the work
The hours that remain aren't all equal. An engaged person and a checked-out one deliver very different value in the same hour. This is the human multiplier pure planning ignores. Defaults are Gallup's global reality — change them to your team.
4What you've committed
How much of the raw, on-paper capacity has this team already been committed to deliver this window? Most plans commit 85–100% of the paper number — and then reality adds more after the plan is "fixed."
The shoulder-tap is the manager who walks past the plan to their favorite developer with an off-sprint "quick favor." It's the expediter position in an Agile sprint — it injects scope the plan never held and forces context-switching, so it costs more than its raw hours. Enter roughly how much extra scope arrives this way after the window is supposedly locked.
Sustainable delivery capacity
0% of on-paper
Where you stand — in context
This is not uniquely yours. Honest teams land here. It's normal — and it's the opportunity.
Typical honest range is roughly 25–40% of paper capacity. Few organizations ever measure this at all — which is exactly why the hours go missing.
Where the hours went
The low number isn't a verdict on your people. It's a map of a system quietly taxing them. Here's the whole path from paper to delivered.
The climb — capacity you can reclaim
None of this asks your people to work harder. It asks the system to stop taxing them. Here's what comes back from the changes you actually control.
Realistic reclaimed capacity
Sustainable capacity after the climb
And why work still feels slow — the flow lens
Capacity is how much your people can do. Flow is whether the work is moving. These are different problems — a busy team and a stalled one look identical from a status deck.
Flow efficiency iFlow efficiency is the share of a task's total elapsed time actually spent being worked on, versus waiting in a queue.Example: a task that needs 2 days of real work but takes 3 weeks (≈15 working days) to clear = 2 ÷ 15 ≈ 13%. The other 87% is wait, not effort. Typical knowledge work runs 5–15%.
15%
Share of a task's life spent being worked, vs. waiting in a queue. Typical knowledge work: 5–15%.
What that means
Estimate your flow efficiency15%
Roughly: if a two-day task takes two weeks to clear the board, that's ~20%.
True Capacity · a planning mirror, not a scorecard · jerrypeterson.ai — Raising the Dead