Is Your Workload Sustainable? What to Consider When Your Capacity Changes

Being able to handle a demanding workload for a day, a week, or even a particularly busy month doesn't necessarily mean that workload is sustainable. You can work ten hours, sit through six meetings, finish an important project, answer emails after dinner, and get up the next morning to do it again, but managing your career requires considering how often you can work that way without your performance, health, or life outside of work paying for it.

Health conditions, caregiving responsibilities, stress, life circumstances, and changes in the work itself can also affect what you can reasonably handle over time. Even if you've managed a similar workload before, your current circumstances may require you to reevaluate what sustainable work looks like now.

I recently talked about capacity with Dr. Amy Behimer, a board-certified health and wellness coach and pharmacist who has lived with multiple sclerosis for most of her career. Although our conversation focused on chronic illness, her approach to understanding capacity applies more broadly to anyone trying to determine how much they can reasonably and consistently handle at work.

Your Best Day Isn't Necessarily Your Capacity

Evaluating your capacity based on what you can do rather than what you can consistently do becomes particularly problematic when your health or energy fluctuates from one day to the next. Handling a packed schedule when your energy is high tells you something about what you're capable of under those conditions, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what a reasonable workload looks like across five workdays, several weeks, or an entire quarter.

Understanding what you can sustain requires looking beyond the number of hours you're working to consider the type of energy your work requires, how much focused thinking you're doing, your meeting load, physical demands, schedule predictability, commute, recovery time, and how frequently you're expected to operate at a high level of intensity. A demanding week followed by a lighter one may be completely manageable, while repeating that same intensity indefinitely may not be.

The amount of control you have over your schedule can also change how demanding the same workload feels. A schedule that works when you can choose when to perform certain tasks may become much harder when meetings, deadlines, or other responsibilities take away that flexibility.

Evaluate What Your Work Requires

When I asked Amy how someone can understand their capacity when health and energy aren't consistent, she suggested approaching the process as an experiment. Work is often performed a particular way because that's how everyone else does it or how someone was trained, but Amy encouraged people to ask, “Are there other ways to reach the exact same goal?”

Separating the required outcome from the process used to achieve it can reveal flexibility that isn't obvious at first. Some responsibilities have fixed deadlines, schedules, physical requirements, client expectations, or regulatory constraints, while others allow more choice in when, where, or how the work gets done.

When I worked in higher education, I learned that my energy tended to be lower in the afternoon, but coaching increased my energy because I enjoyed doing it. I scheduled coaching in the afternoon when possible and protected the mornings for writing, thinking work, and more demanding meetings, which allowed me to organize the same responsibilities around how my energy worked instead of treating every hour of my workday as interchangeable.

Amy described finding similar opportunities as a manager when employees have approached her about responsibilities that require more energy or aren't an ideal fit. Because she can see the needs and strengths of the larger team, she may recognize that another employee prefers that type of work and can redistribute responsibilities when the work allows it. Not every role or team offers that flexibility, but distinguishing between requirements that are genuinely fixed and processes that can change gives you a more accurate picture of what's creating the workload problem.

Check Your Expectations and Priorities

People can feel overwhelmed by their workload even when some of the pressure is coming from expectations that were never clearly established. Amy pointed out that people often overestimate what they should be able to accomplish and carry around the feeling that they should have done more without checking whether those expectations were reasonable.

Amy asks employees to bring her everything on their calendar and task list that's weighing on them so she can help determine what needs to be prioritized. She uses a similar process with her own leader by explaining the hours she has available, what she's trying to fit into them, and what she believes should come first.

If you're questioning whether your workload is sustainable, look at which expectations are coming from your manager, organization, clients, or role and which ones you've created for yourself. What are you responsible for accomplishing? Which deadlines are fixed? What does your manager consider most important? What can move? What have you taken on because you assumed it was necessary or urgent?

Discussing those competing demands with your manager may reveal that you're trying to accomplish more than they expect or prioritizing work differently than they would. Continuing to work longer won't resolve a workload problem caused by unclear priorities, particularly if your manager doesn't know you're trying to fit an unrealistic amount of work into the time or energy available.

When Something Needs to Change

Reorganizing your work, clarifying priorities, getting additional support, or creating greater flexibility may make your workload more sustainable, but those changes can't resolve every mismatch between what a job requires and what you can consistently provide. Some roles have legitimate requirements that can't be changed, and organizations and managers vary considerably in how much flexibility they can or will offer.

Evaluating your Realistic Reality can help you consider what your health and personal circumstances require alongside the demands of your career and current role. External factors such as compensation, health insurance, family responsibilities, the labor market, and the availability of other opportunities also matter when you're deciding whether adjusting your current situation is enough or whether a larger career change deserves consideration.

A relatively small change in how you organize your work or communicate priorities may be enough to make your workload sustainable. A significant change in your health, responsibilities, job, or organization could require you to reconsider whether the role still fits.

Comparing your current capacity with what you could handle five years ago, what you think you should be able to handle, or what someone else appears capable of doing doesn't give you useful information about what will work now. Understanding what you can reasonably sustain gives you a better basis for deciding how to work, what needs to change, and whether your current role still makes sense for the circumstances you're navigating.

For more on managing your career when your health and capacity change, listen to my conversation with Dr. Amy Behimer on Control Your Career: Managing Work, Energy, and Career Growth With Autoimmune Disease.

PODCAST PAGE LINK: https://www.ridethetidecollective.com/podcast/managing-career-with-autoimmune-disease

Additional Resources

CDC/NIOSH: Healthy Work Design and Well-Being Program
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/research-programs/portfolio/hwd.html

CDC/NIOSH: Total Worker Health
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/twh/index.html

CDC/NIOSH: Total Worker Health FAQs
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/twh/faq/index.html

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