You’ve been told to “work within your capacity” without knowing what the f*ck that actually means.
Tales from the Capacity Crypt
A two-week interactive capacity-literacy experience for online service providers
Understand what different work requires from you, where important demands have been easy to miss, and how to make choices that actually account for what your business is asking of you before you’re frustrated, resentful, or completely cooked and realize something didn’t fit.
You are probably already trying to work within your capacity.
You know when there is too much on your calendar. You know a launch week feels different from a normal week. You know certain kinds of client work ask more from you than others. You know some days you can write for hours and other days the same task feels like dragging furniture uphill.
But most business planning still asks you to make decisions using the easiest thing to measure: time.
So you look at the open hours. You count the calls. You check the deadlines. You decide something technically fits.
Then real life gets involved. Your energy changes. Three projects all need the same kind of attention at once. A personal obligation takes more from you than expected. The prep, switching, follow-up, emotional labor, or recovery around the work never made it onto the calendar in the first place.
And when the plan stops working, it is very easy to assume you need more discipline, better systems, more help, a tighter schedule, a different offer, or some other fix.
But before you start fixing shit, it would be useful to know what is actually happening.
Your current choices probably made sense with the information you had. We’re organizing information, not putting you on trial.
Tales from the Capacity Crypt
Instead of treating capacity like a vague feeling or a synonym for “hours available,” you’ll look at the different forms of capacity your business uses, the patterns that can make you overestimate what you have available, and the places where your plans look reasonable on paper but become much harder to execute in real life.
You’ll start identifying what different work requires from you, what tends to drain you, where your capacity fluctuates, and what deserves to be accounted for before you commit, schedule, launch, deliver, or decide something “should fit.”
The goal isn’t to hand you a perfect calendar in the end. It is to help you leave saying:
I understand what my capacity actually consists of, what different work requires from me, and where I’ve been planning from incomplete information.
week 1 -
Inside the Crypt
You’ll start with the recurring pattern that keeps showing up, then learn to separate time, cognitive, emotional, physical/energy, and relational capacity so you can see what different work is actually requiring from you.
You’ll also look at the work around the work: prep, switching, follow-up, admin, recovery, and the invisible demands that never make it onto the calendar.
Each weekday includes:
Short Audio Field Note
Diagnostic Prompt
Slack Discussion & Feedback
Pattern to Watch For
Week 2
Outside the Crypt
Then we bring those capacities into the actual business You’ll look at how your offers, clients, workload, life, and commitments interact; where you may be stacking too much of the same kind of demand; and where the same capacity miscalculations keep showing up.
By the end, you should be able to look at your business and recognize: Oh. I’ve been making decisions with an incomplete definition of capacity.
Each weekday includes:
Short Audio Field Note
Diagnostic Prompt
Slack Discussion & Feedback
Pattern to Watch For
This is not two weeks of Consuming information about capacity.
we are going to investigate your actual business
Let’s Uncover the Dead Weight
From October 12–23, you’ll work through the experience with me inside Slack.
You’ll get short audio field notes, diagnostic prompts, patterns to watch for, discussion and feedback, and ten weekdays of looking at your actual work through a much fuller definition of capacity.
By the end, you should have a clearer picture of what different work requires from you, where important demands have been easy to miss, and which patterns deserve your attention before you automatically blame the calendar, your discipline, or yourself.
This is a focused investigation into one thing that affects nearly every part of the business: what you actually have available to work with.
Your $197 includes:
Two weeks inside the private Slack space
10 weekday audio field notes
10 diagnostic investigations
Daily patterns to watch for
Slack discussion, questions, and feedback from me throughout the experience
Three participant prize drawings
You do not need a perfect schedule, a beautifully organized business, or an exact answer to how much capacity you have before you join.
That is kind of the point.
You have the time.
🪦
But do you actually have the capacity?
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You have the time. 🪦 But do you actually have the capacity? 🪦
Hi, I’m Kathleen.
I ask “based on what?” for a living.
I’m a writer, strategist, business owner, and the founder of The Main Stage, where my work lives at the intersection of business decisions, Emotional Economics, and the actual humans making those decisions.
Over the past couple of years, capacity has shown up again and again in my work—in pricing conversations, offer decisions, systems questions, workload problems, and the very normal moment when someone says, “I don't have capacity for that,” and I immediately want to know:
Based on what?
Sometimes you do, sometimes you absolutely don’t. Sometimes the real problem is somewhere else entirely…
We need to slow down the obvious conclusion long enough to figure out what is actually GOING ON in our businesses sometimes.
I created this experience s because I think you deserve more useful information than “work less,” “get better systems,” or “just protect your capacity.”
For two weeks, we’re going to get much more specific than that and see what that actually means for you..
Questions from the living
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This is not supposed to become another giant commitment you have to squeeze into your business. The goal is to give you enough context to investigate something real, notice what is happening, and bring what you find into Slack. Some days you may spend more time with a prompt because it uncovers something juicy. Other days may be much lighter.
We are not going to create a capacity experience that punishes you for having limited capacity. Come back when you can, use what is useful, and keep moving. You do not need a perfect participation streak to get something meaningful from the experience.
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NO death drop ***
Time is one form of capacity. It is not the whole thing. We are also looking at cognitive, emotional, physical/energy, and relational capacity, and at what happens when those demands overlap inside an actual business. Your calendar can tell you whether two hours are open. It cannot tell you whether you have the right kind of capacity for the work you are thinking about putting there.
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Everyone's does! The goal is not to identify one fixed number called “my capacity” and organize your entire life around it. We are looking for patterns, demands, interactions, and the things you know about yourself well enough to account for when you make decisions.
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No. This helps you see where capacity is affecting your offers, delivery, workload, commitments, and decisions. We are not rebuilding all of those things during these two weeks.
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You could absolutely sit down and think about your capacity on your own. Tales gives you a structured investigation, a fuller way to think about what capacity actually includes, ten days of guided attention on the subject, discussion with other business owners, and my feedback while you work through what you are finding. The value is not access to ten magical questions. It is having the space, language, context, and support to look at a part of your business you may have been describing vaguely for years and finally get more specific about what is required of you to run this bish.
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Excellent. That is useful information too. The point is of this shindig is to investigate your capacity well enough that you can stop using “I don’t have capacity” or “I should have capacity” as a conclusion when the evidence may be pointing somewhere else.
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No. Your life affects your capacity, so personal context may naturally come up. But you decide what you want to share. You can participate actively, ask questions, share what you are finding, or spend more time observing the discussion and doing the investigation privately.
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No. This is designed to work around an actual life. The audio drops, prompts, and Slack conversations will be there for you to work through during the day rather than requiring you to rearrange your schedule around a live class. I’ll be chillin in there so you can reach out at any point if you have questions!
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Every weekday, you’ll get a short audio field note, a diagnostic prompt, a pattern to watch for, and a Slack thread where we can talk through what you’re noticing. We start with your actual recurring capacity patterns, then look at time, cognitive, emotional, physical/energy, and relational capacity before bringing all of that back into your offers, workload, commitments, and business.
You do not need to keep guessing what “capacity” means in your business.
You may already know that the calendar is not telling you the whole story.
Two weeks to figure out what else belongs in the picture: what different work requires from you, where important demands have been easy to miss, how your own capacity changes, and what you want to account for differently going forward.
Not so you can become perfectly optimized.
Not so you can squeeze more work into the available space.
And definitely not so I can tell you what your business is supposed to look like.
The goal is much simpler: Understand what is actually happening well enough to make better choices for yourself and your business.
Tales from the Capacity Crypt runs October 12–23, 2026 .
Not Really Sure Yet and Wanna Go Down the Rabbit Hole?
