You Need a Capacity Review for Your Small Business
This guest post written by rest coach Jordan Maney.
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Understanding how your personal capacity impacts your business as a solopreneur or leader of a small team is incredibly important. When you run a small business that delivers massive transformation through a service or product, you have metrics like KPIs or OKRs to track the work. But what about tracking something vital but intangible — your feelings?
Running a business is a lot. A lot of work, a lot of stress, a lot of reward, a lot of highs, and a lot of lows. It would be nice to think our personal lives never impact our productivity, quality, or deliverables but they do. When there are less people to share the load with via team members or contractors, there’s more to manage.
That’s why you need a capacity review.
Now, capacity usually gets talked about in professional ways with professional metrics. But because you’re running the show solo, you need to track the personal.
I define capacity as the energy, attention, and time available to meet the demands in your life. Notice I said available and not desired! Trouble happens when you work from a place of desired capacity. It’s how you burn out!
You want to get a clear picture of your available energy, attention, and time in a given year. This will help you better understand how to plan projects, launches, and collaborations.
So how do you complete a personal capacity review? Here’s what you’ll need:
Your calendar: preferably one that shows your personal and professional appointments.
Something to write with: can be a notebook, whiteboard, or note-taking app.
Time: break this down into 45 minute chunks or if you have a free workday, take it.
Caffeine
A very honest approach
A note before beginning: take this one year at a time. If some outlying traumatic event happened to you this year (hello 2025), do an extra year to compare.
Here’s how you’ll break this down:
You’re going to go to your calendar and review month to month. In your notes break each month into four sections:
What happened: what impacted you?
What I wanted to do: what did you plan?
What I did: what did you initiate and execute?
How I felt: what was going on underneath the surface?
For the “what happened” section, look to global events. What happened in January 2025? This can be things in the world and your world. The purpose is to see what things may have influenced your energy, attention, and time.
For the “what I wanted to do” section, look to your plans. This one isn’t meant to be painful. But be honest. What did you want to get done at the beginning of the year? This isn’t meant to be done with a judgmental attitude either. Just be clear on what your plans were. It’s okay to recognize things changed, you had to pivot, or you decided not to pursue something anymore.
For the “what I did” section, look to your own output. What did you get done in the business? Was it social media campaigns? Was it a certain amount of meetings? If you already track KPIs (key performance indicators) this is an excellent place to make use of them. This is a critical piece. Seeing this will help you better understand what your capacity actually was versus what you wanted it to be.
Finally, for the “how I felt” section, look to your own feelings. What was going on behind the scenes and under the surface? Were their hormonal fluctuations that impacted your outlook or energy? Was it a lean month and perhaps you weren’t eating as nutritiously as you’d normally like? Were weird things happening in your relationships? Did your physical or mental health shift?
As you work through this, trends will emerge. Again be clear and kind with yourself as they do.
Questions like this may pop up for you:
Did you have to put in more effort to sell an established product or service?
Where did your mental health fluctuate during the year? What impacted that?
Are there certain expected events that happen every year? What do they require in terms of your energy, attention, and time?
Where did you rest? Did you take intentional breaks or try to grind through it?
What kind of support did you need to get through this year? What kind of support would you need to do more of what you planned?
It can be difficult to forecast with constant economic and geopolitical changes happening. If your business survived 2020, and every year since, you know what I mean.
But this tool is a good way to look at what you need to keep going. All of us will need rest and support to get through this next chapter.
Use this tool to better understand what you need to sustain yourself and your business through it.
Discover More Ways to Rest with Jordan Maney
Jordan Maney is a rest coach who offers workshops and support for small business owners and professionals in caring roles, who often give a lot of themselves to their customers and clients.
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