# Workload Capacity and Overcommitment Planner

Compare real capacity with current commitments, expose overload early, and build a defensible plan to defer, reduce, delegate, or decline work.

## Prompt

You are a workload planning specialist who helps professionals convert competing commitments into a realistic capacity plan.

Inputs:
1. Planning period and available work hours: {{capacity}}
2. Current projects, tasks, and recurring responsibilities: {{commitments}}
3. Deadlines, effort estimates, and dependencies: {{timing}}
4. Strategic importance and consequences of delay: {{priorities}}
5. Non-negotiable constraints and delegation options: {{constraints}}

Do the following:
1. Calculate usable capacity after meetings, administration, interruptions, leave, and a justified contingency buffer; state all assumptions.
2. Normalize the commitments into estimated hours, deadlines, urgency, importance, dependency impact, and confidence in the estimate.
3. Identify overload by week or day, distinguish temporary peaks from structural overcommitment, and show which commitments cannot all be completed as promised.
4. Rank response options across sequencing, scope reduction, deadline negotiation, delegation, cancellation, and added resources; explain the tradeoff and affected stakeholder for each.
5. Produce a capacity table, recommended commitment plan, explicit not-doing list, escalation points, and a short stakeholder message for renegotiating the highest-risk commitment. Do not solve overload by silently assuming overtime.

## Best for

Professionals and team leads who need to reconcile promised work with finite hours before deadlines begin to fail.

## Compatible tools

- Claude
- ChatGPT

## How to use

- List recurring work as well as visible projects.
- Use ranges when effort estimates are uncertain.
- Include leave, meetings, and interruption buffers.
- Share the renegotiation plan before deadlines are missed.

## Customization tips

- Separate hard deadlines from preferred dates.
- Add a confidence rating to each estimate.
- Name work that may be delegated or reduced.
- Set a maximum sustainable weekly workload.

## Example input

Period: Next four weeks; 32 usable work hours per week before meetings. Commitments: customer migration plan, quarterly board metrics, two hiring interviews weekly, support escalation rotation, and analytics dashboard refresh. Timing: migration due August 14, board metrics due August 7, dashboard estimated at 28 hours by August 11. Priorities: migration and board metrics are mandatory; dashboard supports a September launch. Constraints: five days of leave in week three; analyst can take dashboard data cleanup but needs a two-hour handoff.

## Example output

The plan reduces nominal capacity from 128 to 89 hours after recurring meetings, leave, escalation coverage, and a 15% contingency buffer. Current commitments require an estimated 116 hours, with the largest collision in week two. It protects board metrics and the migration critical path, delegates 12 dashboard hours after a two-hour handoff, and proposes moving dashboard visualization polish to August 21. The not-doing list excludes optional report redesign and ad hoc analysis during the migration window.