Capacity planning
Capacity planning for freelancers who keep finding out too late
A day has a fixed number of hours. Your task list does not know that, so you say yes until something gives. Capacity planning is the small habit that lets you see a full day before you start, not at 5pm when it is already lost.
Why a day keeps overflowing
The list grows. The day does not.
You take on one more thing because it sounds small. Then another, because a client asked nicely. None of them feel heavy on their own. Together they are six hours of focus stacked into a four hour afternoon.
The trouble is that a task list has no sense of time. It will happily hold thirty items and look the same at item three as at item thirty. So the day looks fine when you plan it and falls apart while you live it.
You feel it around 5pm. The two things that mattered are still open, you are tired, and tomorrow already has its own full plate. The work was never the problem. Not seeing the day was full, before you committed to it, was.
Try it
Build a day and watch it tip into red
Toggle tasks on and off. The bar fills as you add work and turns red the moment the plan runs past the six hours of real focus in a working day. This is the whole idea, in your hand.
1h of focus left
A made-up day, sized in whole hours. Switch tasks on and off to see where the line is.
How it works for one person
Capacity planning, without the spreadsheet
It is four small moves, done in the planner you already keep. No separate model, no Friday admin ritual.
Give each task a size
Pick a rough size when you add a task, and TaskBerry turns it into minutes for you. You stop guessing whether something is quick and start seeing what it actually costs the day.
Set today's real capacity
Not the eight hours on paper. The hours you genuinely have left after calls, errands, and the parts of the day that are already spoken for. A real day is usually closer to five or six focused hours than to eight.
Watch the bar before you commit
As you add work, the bar fills. When the plan runs past your hours it turns red, while you are still planning. That red is your cue to move something to tomorrow, not a verdict at the end of the day.
Keep a buffer on purpose
Leave the last stretch of the bar empty for the call that runs long and the fix that takes twice as long as it should. A day planned to the brim has no room for the day to happen.
Before you place a task
Meetings come out of the day first
You're at your desk for eight hours, but not all eight are yours. Calls and meetings come off the top, before a single task is placed. Add or remove a few and watch the room left for real work shrink.
Full. Your plan fits, with nothing to spare.
A made-up day. The plan stays a steady six hours; the meetings are what move the line.
Zoom out to the week
A week can look free and still not fit
Every demo so far asks one day's question. The real one is bigger: is the week already full before you say yes? Here is a week with recurring work already on it. Say yes to a two-day project and watch which days give.
4h 30m of focus left this week
- Mon5h
- Tue5h 30m
- Wed4h 30m
- Thu5h 30m
- Fri5h
A made-up week, planned against six focused hours a day. The two-day project needs three hours on two days, and the two fullest days do not have them.
Realistic hours
Why your billable week looks smaller
There is a gap between the hours you are at your desk and the hours you can actually bill, and that gap surprises people who go solo. Email, quoting, invoicing, the call that becomes three calls: none of it shows up on an invoice, and all of it eats the day.
Take a plain example to make the point. Say you work five days and aim for six focused hours a day. That is thirty hours of deep work on paper. Knock off the meetings, the admin, and the context switching, and the part a client pays for is often closer to twenty. Your numbers will differ. The shape rarely does.
Capacity planning will not invent more hours. It does something quieter and more useful: it makes the real number visible while you plan, so you size your week to the hours you have instead of the hours you wish you had.
6h
A realistic focused day for many freelancers, the number this demo plans against. Yours may be five, or seven.
Honest fit
Who this is, and is not, for
Built for one freelancer with a handful of clients
If you run 2 to 5 clients on your own and the real risk is saying yes to a day that is already full, this is built for exactly that. One screen, one day, one person. No seats, no shared workspace, nothing to roll out.
Not a team capacity tool
If you need to balance work across a team, plan resourcing for an agency, or report utilization up a chain, this is the wrong shape and we would rather you knew now. TaskBerry plans one person's day, on purpose, and stops there.
Honest answers
Questions worth asking first
- Is this just time tracking with extra steps?
- No. Time tracking tells you where the hours went after the fact. Capacity planning shows you whether the hours fit before you start. TaskBerry does both: it tracks time per task, but the point of the bar is the forecast you see while you are still planning the day.
- Do I have to use the AI to plan capacity?
- Not at all. Berry can turn a brain dump into sized tasks to save you typing, but the capacity bar is a plain visual that works whether or not you ever open the assistant. The red is the product. The AI is a shortcut to filling it in.
- What counts as a realistic day?
- Whatever is left after the parts of your day that are already spoken for. For a lot of freelancers that lands near five or six focused hours, not eight. You set your own number, and the bar holds you to the one you chose rather than the one on paper.
- Is the free plan enough for capacity planning?
- Yes. Unlimited tasks, the capacity bar, deadlines, and per-task time tracking are all on the free plan, so you can plan a realistic day without paying anything. Pro at €9.95 a month adds the assistant, client reports, and work sessions, but the capacity habit itself is free.
Keep going
Plan from your real capacity
Start with what billable hours are, work out your honest number, then plan the day against it.
See if today is already full
Start free, add a real day, and watch the bar. You will know in five minutes whether planning from your capacity is the habit you have been missing.