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What Does This Require of Your Capacity?
We are used to planning around time. Crisha Lewis, an LFTX Board Member, created her own work dashboard and started planning around energy, too, using an “energy capacity” counter alongside her schedule, projects, and other obligations.
She wasn’t just asking, “Do I have time for this?” She was asking, “Do I have the capacity for this, given everything else already on my plate?”
Of course, noticing capacity doesn’t magically create more. Many educators have very little control over schedules, staffing, workloads, or mandates. But even when we can’t change the whole system, we may have more influence over our own capacity than we realize.
Protecting Your Capacity
Several years ago, a colleague and I recorded a podcast episode and facilitated a series of webinars about burnout. In our research, we discovered ideas that helped create boundaries, pause before automatically stepping in, and reshape parts of our days.
Greg McKeown champions this idea of restraint. In Essentialism, he suggests we “edit our tendency to step in.” He offers simple examples: resisting the temptation to immediately reply-all to an email or add our two cents in a meeting. Instead, we can wait. We can observe.
As education leaders, many of us are accustomed to contributing, powering through emails, and checking off tasks. But what if, occasionally, we simply wait to see whether someone else responds first?
The First Five
Another possibility comes from Dr. Joe Sanfelippo, one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Learning Forward Annual Conference. Joe’s “First Five Things” reflection begins by listing what you typically do when you arrive at work: unpack your bag, open your computer, check email, etc.
Now ask yourself: Which of these things bring you joy? His challenge is to reconfigure those first few actions so that something that gives you energy or meaning comes before the things that immediately begin taking it. He suggests trying the same thing when you arrive home.
We may not control everything the day brings, but perhaps we can protect a little capacity by being more intentional about how we enter it.
Job Crafting
The Headspace meditation app first led me to the idea of job crafting: making small changes to the work you already have to make it more engaging, meaningful, or manageable. Job crafting can take several forms: task crafting changes something about the tasks you do; relational crafting changes who you interact or collaborate with; and cognitive crafting changes how you think about the purpose or meaning of the work.
I still think about this idea when I notice my own capacity shifting throughout the day. If I no longer have the energy for deep thinking, I might turn to administrative tasks that still need to be completed. If I’ve spent too much time working independently, I might reach out to someone whose energy or curiosity helps restore mine. And if I’ve spent hours in meetings or conversations, I might choose work I can do quietly on my own.
Of course, not everyone has the flexibility to rearrange the work in front of them. A classroom teacher can’t simply opt out of the next class, and a district leader may have a calendar filled with required meetings. But even within those constraints, there may be opportunities to adjust how we approach the work: simplify a task, use a familiar routine instead of creating something new, ask someone to share the load, or save our highest-effort thinking for another time.
The question becomes less: Can I get out of this? and more: What do I have some influence over right now?
Protecting our capacity can help keep every demand from taking more than it needs. But even with thoughtful boundaries and small adjustments, our capacity will still become depleted. Sometimes we need to give something back.
(As I revisited this research, I wanted to bring some of these ideas together in a practical way, so I vibe-coded a small tool to help. The Capacity Reset offers a quick way to notice what’s draining you, find where you have some influence, and choose one small way to protect or restore your capacity.)
Restoring Your Capacity
Restoring capacity doesn’t need to become another item on the to-do list. Sometimes what we need is remarkably small: a little movement, a little space, or a little connection.
Emily and Amelia Nagoski describe physical activity as one of the most efficient ways to help the body move through the stress response. Annie Murphy Paul points to the restorative effects of time in nature. And Timothy Kanold and Tina Boogren remind us that “we are wired to connect” and “Our social wellness serves our physical, mental, and emotional wellness.”
None of those possibilities requires an elaborate wellness routine. A walk around the building, a few quiet minutes without another input, or a conversation with someone who gives us energy may be enough to shift what we have available.
And sometimes restoration may look like doing very little at all. An unexpected ten minutes doesn’t have to become ten productive minutes. We can leave a little space open.
The challenge, of course, is that when our capacity is already low, the last thing we need is a long list of things we should be doing differently.
Noticing the Impact
Our capacity matters beyond ourselves. How we respond when our capacity is depleted can shape the experience of the people we lead.
During a Learning Forward conference planning meeting, we explored the HBR article 6 Ways Leaders Harness Stress. The authors describe six common responses to stress, from becoming more controlling or withdrawn to pushing harder or trying to rescue others. Rather than simply identifying our own tendencies, we focused our discussion on the adaptive strategies associated with each.
The article helped us pause, reflect, and ask: When I’m depleted, how do I show up at work, and what does that create for everyone around me?
Marc Brackett offers another reason that question matters. In Permission to Feel, he shares “where there is an emotionally skilled principal, there are teachers who are less stressed and more satisfied.” He also writes:
Teachers who are stressed offer less information and praise, are less accepting of student ideas, and interact less frequently with students. If we want children to flourish, we have to begin taking care of our teachers.
Our capacity can affect how patiently we listen, how quickly we respond, how much curiosity we bring to a problem, whether we invite another perspective, and how readily we step in and take over.
That doesn’t mean we should add “show up perfectly for everyone else” to an already overloaded list of expectations. A full calendar can show us where our time is already committed, even when meetings overlap, obligations compete, and the work itself still needs to get done. What it can’t show us is the capacity those demands require.
Perhaps another question is worth asking: What will this require of my capacity, and what might I need to protect or restore so I can bring the attention, patience, creativity, and care this work deserves?
Individual strategies can’t repair unreasonable workloads or unhealthy systems, but noticing capacity can help us recognize what needs to change, what we can influence, and when we need to stop simply absorbing the strain.
Perhaps the next step isn’t doing more. It’s noticing what we have available, where we have some influence, and choosing one small reset for today.
Kathryn Laster brings over 30 years of education expertise as a math teacher, instructional coach, and digital learning consultant. As an independent consultant, she creates and facilitates transformative learning experiences through intentional, human-centered, tech-infused design, with a goal of normalizing excellence in adult learning design. Kathryn is a graduate of the 2025 Learning Forward Academy and is part of the Texas host committee for the Learning Forward Annual Conference.
Connect with Kathryn at kathrynlaster.info and at Refined Learning Design.
