When Did Capacity Become Another Thing We’re Supposed to Maximize?

"Capacity" Is Not a Diagnosis

I have a pet peeve about the way online business uses the word capacity.

It has become one of those buzzwords tossed around constantly without anyone defining what the hell they actually mean by it: Work within your capacity. Protect your capacity. Build a capacity-based business. Maximize your capacity.

The word sounds thoughtful. Human, even—like we’ve finally acknowledged that people have limits, bodies, and lives outside of production. Then, five minutes later, we are right back to asking how much more we can cram into a week.

Capacity should help us understand ourselves. Instead, online business turned it into convenient shorthand for a pre-packaged prescription:

• Overwhelmed? Build systems.

• Too busy? Outsource.

• Struggling with revenue? Raise your prices.

• Offer not selling? Reposition it.

Sometimes those are reasonable answers. But "capacity" isn’t what makes them good answers. That isn't diagnosis—it's just marketing.

Marketing is allowed to market, and I’m not scandalized that businesses use familiar problems to get people through the door. I do it too. I’m just interested in what happens after they walk through it.

If you are going to promise that a solution will fix someone's capacity, you need to answer real questions:

• What kind of capacity are we talking about—cognitive, emotional, relational, or physical?

• What is currently consuming it?

• What does this solution actually reduce, and what does it add?

• What does the person have to learn, manage, or maintain for it to work?

Those questions matter. But they disappear the second "capacity" gets reduced to a generic rallying cry: You have too much going on, so buy this thing.

Some capacity-saving solutions only create more work

This is one of the things I find particularly funny about the online-business version of capacity: we are constantly being sold things that are supposed to create more of it.

Systems. Automations. Software. Processes. Support. Teams.

And plenty of those things can absolutely make a business easier to run. They can also require massive amounts of capacity.

You have to choose the software, learn it, set it up, connect it to everything else, troubleshoot it when something breaks, pay for it every month, and eventually decide whether you still need it six months later when you have forgotten why you bought it in the first place.

You hire someone to free up your time, and now you have another relationship to manage. You create a system to reduce decision-making, and first you have to make fifty decisions about the system. You automate a process and then need enough understanding of the automation to know what happened when it sends the wrong email to 400 people.

None of this means we should never automate, hire, or build systems.

It means “this saves capacity” is not a complete thought.

A solution can reduce one demand while increasing another. That is worth knowing before we prescribe it.

We talk about support as though money is the only constraint

Think about the usual way we talk about DIY, done-with-you, and done-for-you services.

The conversation is often primarily financial. If you have less money, DIY. If you can spend a little more, done-with-you. If you have the budget, hire somebody to do it for you.

But money is not the only thing involved in receiving support.

DIY may be cheaper and require enormous amounts of time, learning, decision-making, and execution. Done-with-you may require meetings, feedback, homework, approvals, collaboration, and enough mental space to participate meaningfully in the process. Done-for-you may cost substantially more money while requiring much less direct involvement.

Which one is appropriate depends on more than the bank balance.

Someone may have plenty of money and absolutely no desire to be deeply involved. Someone else may have limited funds but love learning and have time available. Another person may technically be able to afford a done-with-you service but have no realistic capacity to participate in it during the next three months.

That is part of the buying decision too.

Yet we rarely talk about it that way. Instead, capacity gets used in the marketing copy while the capacity required to engage with the solution remains conveniently invisible.

And then there is “freeing up capacity”

This phrase deserves its own little corner of hell.

Because what exactly are we freeing it up for?

Sometimes people know. They want to write. Spend more time with their kids. Garden. Make better work. Think again. Travel. Stop spending three hours every Tuesday fighting with software they hate.

Great.

But I also think there are a lot of people who have spent so long at or beyond their limits that they genuinely do not know what they would do with breathing room because they have not had any.

They work, then recover enough to work again, then work some more.

So when a little space finally appears, the first instinct is often to ask what productive thing belongs there: What could I create? Who should I talk to? What should I launch? What can I get ahead on? How do I use this well?

Maybe you do not need to use it.

Maybe breathing room can just be breathing room. Maybe making your work easier is enough. Maybe thinking clearly is enough. Maybe not feeling like everything is one minor inconvenience away from collapse is enough.

Maybe you find out you like gardening. Maybe you sit outside. Maybe you spend time with somebody you love without half your brain running tomorrow’s task list.

Maybe you get bored.

I am increasingly convinced that boredom is not an emergency.

Somehow we turned a limit into another optimization project

This is what I find so bizarre about the evolution of capacity online.

The concept should have given us a way to acknowledge something very basic: human beings have limits, those limits change, and life, bodies, relationships, and work all affect what we have available.

And then online business got ahold of the concept and somehow ended up back at: how do we maximize it? How do we make better use of it? How do we squeeze the most out of our high-capacity days? How do we free some up so we can redeploy it somewhere more profitable?

We took a concept that could have helped us stop treating ourselves like machines and turned it into a better machine-management strategy.

Impressive, honestly.

We are not machines for capitalism

We do, unfortunately, need money.

Most of us have to work. Most people building businesses online are not living in some magical post-capitalist woodland where invoices are optional and the mortgage can be paid in heirloom tomatoes.

We need businesses that function. We need revenue. We have people depending on us.

But needing to participate in capitalism does not mean our entire existence has to be organized around maximizing our participation in it.

We are humans, and I think that matters especially for entrepreneurs.

There is a reason we joke about leaving a nine-to-five so we can work twenty-four hours a day for ourselves. For a lot of people, conventional employment did not fit particularly well in the first place. Maybe we wanted autonomy. Maybe we needed flexibility. Maybe our bodies, families, brains, personalities, ambitions, caregiving responsibilities, or lives did not fit neatly into the traditional structure.

So we built something else.

And then, somehow, we recreated the same obsession with constant productivity inside it.

Except now we also have to do sales.

I do not want to maximize my capacity

I want to explore it.

I want to know what I have available and notice when that changes. I want to understand what different kinds of work require from me. I want enough breathing room that I can make good work and still have a life I actually participate in.

And most of all, I want to work with my capacity without shame.

That is very different from maximizing it.

There will be times when I have a lot available and I use it. There will be times when I have less. There will be periods when work needs more from me because bills are real and circumstances are what they are.

There will also be times when I have room and choose not to immediately turn it into another opportunity to produce something.

I am not interested in becoming the most efficient possible converter of my own humanity into output.

That was never the point.

So yes, I am going to keep using the word capacity. I am currently marketing an entire experience about it.

But if we are going to use the word, I want us to actually mean something by it.

Not as shorthand for “you are overwhelmed and I have a system to sell you.” Not as a prettier synonym for productivity. And definitely not as another resource we are supposed to squeeze until we have extracted the maximum possible value.

Maybe the radical thing is much simpler.

Understand what you have available. Work with it. And stop being ashamed that you are a human being instead of a machine.