Market Core · Content Calendar · Module
Capacity
How much the organisation can actually produce, approve and publish — with the buffer that lets the schedule survive an ordinary disruption.
The idea
How it works
Most calendars fail on capacity rather than on ideas. The plan is built from what would be good to publish and checked against nothing, and it is then met by reducing quality rather than volume.
The constraint is usually approval rather than production. Adding writers to a system whose bottleneck is a legal review changes the queue and not the output.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Convert the plan into production hours
Using the per-format costs. The comparison against available hours is usually decisive.
- 02
Find the actual constraint
Whichever step everything waits at. It is rarely the one being resourced.
- 03
Hold a buffer
A plan at full capacity breaks the first time someone is unavailable, and it breaks visibly.
- 04
Cut volume before quality
The alternative is chosen by default and is worse, because the audience notices.
One level in
The components of capacity
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Adding writers to a system whose bottleneck is legal review lengthens the queue and changes nothing else.
The other modules in content calendar
The cadence
How often the organisation publishes, per channel and per format, set at a level it can hold through a difficult quarter rather than at its best month.
LearnThe plan
What is scheduled, when, and by whom — far enough ahead that production has time, close enough that it can respond to what is happening.
LearnSeasonal moments
The fixed points in the year worth planning around, identified from the audience’s calendar rather than from the organisation’s.
Learn