Managing Your Engineers Capacity
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Open the planning workload view in Teamwork and look at your engineers' daily capacity for the current week. Identify any day where someone is over eight hours and figure out what can be pushed or redistributed. Then check that no task spans more than two to three days — if it does, break it into tighter date ranges.
The Workload View
The planning view in Teamwork — specifically the workload view — is your primary tool for managing engineering capacity. It rolls up your full team and shows how many hours each engineer has assigned to them on any given day.
This is something you should be looking at nearly every day, ideally at the end of the day. It gives you a read on what your engineers have coming up tomorrow and whether they have the capacity to execute.
The Eight-Hour Target
The goal is to keep each engineer as close to eight hours per day as possible. When you see someone in the red — like Christopher in Cam's example, who had 13 hours assigned on a single Wednesday — that is a signal to take action.
Those 13 hours are made up of tasks assigned to Christopher for that day plus any meetings synced from his Google Calendar. Calendar sync matters because customer meetings eat into focused execution time.
When an engineer is overloaded, the question becomes: what can get pushed out to later in the week or into the following week? Were there commitments made to deliver specific things by a certain date? Work through those trade-offs proactively rather than waiting for the engineer to flag that not everything is getting done.
Keep Tasks Tight
Cam recommends that tasks should not span more than two or three days at most. The reason is how Teamwork handles estimated time on multi-day tasks — it divides the hours equally across every day in the range.
A four-hour task stretched across a full week shows up as roughly 40 minutes per day. Realistically, nobody is spending 14 minutes on a task every single day. And when someone sees they have until Friday, there is a good chance the work does not start on Monday.
For anything under two hours, assign it to a single day. For larger tasks, keep the date range tight. This makes capacity planning more accurate and gives engineers a clearer picture of what to focus on each day.
Smoothing the Week
A common pattern is tasks piling up on Mondays. When you push things out from the current week, they tend to land on the first day of the following week, creating a parking lot effect.
As you plan throughout the week and look ahead, try to smooth out the eight-hour target across every day. Friday often has fewer hours allocated, so there may be room to balance things there. The goal is that every day, your engineer has a realistic and achievable set of tasks to execute against.
Check Your Projects Too
Beyond the daily workload view, come back to your projects under each client. Make sure tasks within key projects have dates and estimated times. If something does not have a date, it will not show up in the workload view at all.
This is especially important around milestones tied to the engagement roadmap — whether that was set during the sales cycle, a kickoff, or a diagnostic. If you committed to delivering something by a certain week, make sure the tasks feeding that delivery are properly scheduled and estimated so nothing falls through the cracks.
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