Capacity and workload
Is there genuinely too much work, or too much of the wrong work? Overload, key-person dependency, busy periods and the difference between a team that is short-handed and a team spending its best hours on work that should not exist.
Free · usually only a few minutes · no account
Every overloaded team feels short-handed, and some of them are. The useful question is what the extra hours are actually going into: work that only your team can do, or chasing, copying, formatting and re-doing.
The difference matters because the two have different answers. Real capacity shortage is solved by capacity — a hire, a contractor, moving work. Wasted capacity is solved by removing the waste, and adding a person to it simply gives the waste a bigger budget.
The other thing worth establishing early is whether this is a shape or a spike. A quarter that is brutal and then ends is not a headcount problem, however it feels in week six.
Worth settling before any of these
- How long this has been going on, and whether there is a date after which it eases.
- What share of the load is judgement, and what share is administration around it.
- Whether the pressure sits on the whole team or on one or two people.
- What would stop happening if nobody did anything about it.
The questions in this family
My team is overloaded. What should I do?
Start by finding out whether the overload is volume, design or ownership. Each has a different fix, and only one of them is more people.
Read the answerToo much depends on one person. What are my options?
Reduce the fragility before it becomes a crisis: write the work down, develop a second person, move adjacent work off them, or decide it is acceptable for now with a date to look again.
Read the answerRepetitive admin is eating the week
Work out how much of it should exist at all before automating any of it. Some repetitive admin is a process nobody has simplified, some is a good candidate for software, and a little of it genuinely needs a person.
Read the answerIs this a busy period or a real capacity problem?
A peak has a shape and an end; a capacity problem does not. Telling them apart before you commit to a salary is the single most valuable thing you can do here.
Read the answerHow do I reduce workload without hiring?
Three levers in order: stop doing some of it, change how the rest flows, and automate what is genuinely repeatable. Most teams reach for the third and skip the first two.
Read the answerMy best people are doing low-value work
Expensive people doing cheap work is a real and quantifiable loss. The fix is usually to move or remove the work, not to hire someone junior to absorb it.
Read the answer
Nearby decisions
These families overlap with this one often enough to be worth a look — most team decisions turn out to belong to more than one of them.