Navigating the High-Water Mark: Capacity vs. Availability
Your capacity doesn't necessarily match your availability.
Your calendar is a map of where you can go; your capacity is the fuel in the tank.
Most business owners treat a blank calendar as an invitation. If there is a white box at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday, they assume they are “free.”
They look at the open ocean and see only the horizon, forgetting that the depth of the dive matters just as much as the distance traveled. Think of it like this: you are confusing availability with capacity.
One is about time; the other is about regulation.
The Binary vs. The Volume
To build a business that is emotionally sustainable, you must learn to protect your internal currents from external demands.
Availability is binary. It is the literal presence or absence of a commitment. If you aren’t in a meeting, you are “open.” It is a shallow, surface-level metric.
Capacity is a ceiling. It is the total volume of work—cognitive, emotional, and physical—that you can process before the quality of your output begins to degrade. It is your high-water mark.
Availability creates options. Capacity creates calm.
The Sprint and the Stall
Imagine an orca. An orca is technically “available” to swim at maximum speed at any hour of the day. But its capacity for that exertion is limited. If it attempts to sprint for twenty-four hours straight simply because the sea is “open,” it will eventually beach itself.
I’ve seen too many practitioners do exactly this. They fill every “white box” with a client project or a discovery call. By Wednesday, their availability is gone, but their capacity was breached by Tuesday afternoon.
Design effort; don’t exhaust yourself. When you sell your availability without respecting your capacity, you are borrowing against your future stability.
Regulate the Intake
Here is what you can do to find your steady current again:
Calculate Your Baseline Load: Before selling an hour, account for the “tax” of running the business—admin, learning, and rest.
The Buffer is the System: In a well-designed business, the “gap” between availability and capacity isn’t wasted time. It is the water that allows the system to breathe.
Signal Your Boundaries: Practice the declarative “No.” It sounds like: “I have the time, but I do not have the capacity.”
Clear currents carry farther than frantic flails. If you sell all your availability, you will eventually have no capacity left to lead the pod.
To help you determine your capacity, I’ve created the Bizorca Capacity Audit worksheet to help. Take 15 minutes to complete this audit in order to help determine your actual capacity for client work, while maintaining your sanity for all other aspects of your business and regulating your nervous system at the same time. This is a free PDF download for all subscribers.
