Build a Weekly Capacity Plan From Your Open Projects

A full project list can still hide the one fact that matters most: whether your team has enough time to finish the work already promised. Deadlines may look reasonable one by one, while the same person is quietly carrying three critical deliverables in the same week.

This workflow turns a simple list of open work into a seven-day capacity plan. The goal is not to let AI schedule your business. The goal is to make overload, missing estimates, and deadline collisions visible early enough for you to act.

What you will create

By the end, you will have:

1. A weekly view of available hours by person.
2. A list of projects most likely to slip.
3. A short recovery plan for the top three conflicts.
4. A clear decision about what to delegate, renegotiate, or postpone.

If you already review your numbers with a weekly CEO dashboard, add this capacity plan beside it. Revenue tells you what the business produced. Capacity tells you whether the current workload is sustainable.

Prerequisites

Gather the following in a spreadsheet or plain-text table:

• Project or deliverable name
• Owner
• Due date
• Estimated hours remaining
• Hours that person can actually work during the next seven days
• Priority: critical, important, or flexible
• Known blockers
• Confidence in the estimate: high, medium, or low

Use project codes instead of customer names if the data is sensitive. Do not include contracts, payment details, health information, passwords, private customer messages, or confidential employee notes.

Step 1: Clean the source list

Remove completed work and split large projects into deliverables that can be finished or reviewed within one week. A row called "website redesign" is too broad. Rows such as "approve homepage copy" and "finish checkout testing" give the analysis something concrete to evaluate.

Check that every row has an owner, due date, and hours-remaining estimate. Mark unknown information as "unknown" instead of guessing.

Step 2: Run the capacity scan

Paste your table beneath this prompt. Keep the column names intact so the output is easy to audit.

Act as an operations analyst helping a small business plan the next seven days. Analyze only the project data I provide. Do not invent hours, deadlines, owners, or business rules.

For each owner:
1. Add their estimated hours remaining across all assigned deliverables.
2. Compare that total with their available hours.
3. Calculate a load ratio using estimated hours divided by available hours.
4. Flag any owner above 90 percent capacity, any due-date collision, and any low-confidence estimate attached to critical work.

Then return:
- A capacity table with owner, available hours, assigned hours, load ratio, and status
- The five deliverables most likely to slip, with the evidence for each flag
- Missing information that could materially change the result
- Three decisions a human owner should consider

Use the labels Clear, Watch, and Overloaded. Treat unknown values as unknown, not zero. End by asking me to confirm the calculations before suggesting schedule changes.

PROJECT DATA:
[PASTE YOUR TABLE HERE]

Step 3: Verify the math before acting

Recalculate the assigned-hours totals in your spreadsheet. Confirm that part-time schedules, planned time off, meetings, and non-project responsibilities were included in available hours.

Pay special attention to these common errors:

• AI treated an unknown estimate as zero.
• A deliverable appeared twice under slightly different names.
• Calendar time was confused with productive work time.
• A person was assumed to be interchangeable with someone who has different skills.
• A flexible internal task was ranked above a customer commitment.

The output is a planning draft. Your source records and your judgment remain authoritative.

Step 4: Build a recovery plan for the real conflicts

Choose no more than three overloads that could affect a customer, cash flow, or an important launch. Paste only those rows into the next prompt.

Help me resolve these confirmed capacity conflicts without inventing people, skills, dates, or customer promises.

For each conflict, give me three realistic options:
1. Reduce or split the scope
2. Move or renegotiate the deadline
3. Reassign work using only the people and skills shown in my data

For every option, show the likely benefit, the tradeoff, the person who must approve it, and the first communication that should happen. If the data does not support an option, label it Not supported instead of forcing an answer.

Finish with a recommended order of operations for the next business day. Keep the recommendation reversible until the project owner confirms it.

CONFIRMED CONFLICTS:
[PASTE UP TO THREE CONFLICTS HERE]

Step 5: Turn the plan into a weekly operating habit

Run the scan at the same time each week, preferably before new work is promised. Save a dated snapshot so you can compare estimates with actual outcomes. Over time, you will see which kinds of projects are consistently underestimated and where handoffs create delays.

When a high-risk deliverable does slip, use the service recovery plan to prepare the customer communication and internal response. If workload changes could affect near-term cash, compare the decision with your 13-week cash flow scenario.

Review checklist

Before sharing the plan, confirm:

• Every total matches the source spreadsheet.
• No private customer or employee information appears in the output.
• The plan separates facts from assumptions.
• Owners have confirmed estimates for critical work.
• No deadline has changed without the right person approving it.
• The final plan leaves buffer for urgent work.

Your next action

Create the seven-column source table now and fill in the five deliverables with the nearest deadlines. Run the first prompt on that small set before expanding it to the entire business.