Focus Blocks Are the Real Measure of Your Team's Capacity

What matters isn’t how many projects you’re juggling, but how many you’re actually finishing

“If we could just get everyone using Asana properly, we’d finally know what the team is capable of.”

I hear some version of this from leaders every week. When teams feel stretched thin and projects aren’t moving fast enough, the knee-jerk reaction is to implement better project tracking. The thinking goes that if we can see everything that’s happening, we can better manage our capacity.

But seeing all your team’s tasks laid out in a project management tool won’t solve your capacity problems. It often makes things worse by creating additional administrative burden while obscuring what really matters: how much focused time your team has for strategic work. In fact, better task tracking often creates the illusion of control while making the real problem worse.

Strategic Work Usually Requires Focus Blocks

What teams actually need isn’t better task tracking. It’s a way to protect and measure their capacity for meaningful work.

Here’s a better approach: Start measuring your team’s capacity in focus blocks.

A focus block is 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted time dedicated to a single strategic project. Think of these as your team’s currency for meaningful progress. Without enough focus blocks, even the most sophisticated project management system won’t help your strategic work move forward.

Strategic projects need at least three focus blocks per week to maintain momentum — the minimum threshold we’ve found for making meaningful progress on important work. This isn’t arbitrary; it’s based on years of observing how work actually gets done in high-performing teams. Anything less than three blocks per week, and projects tend to stall.

Here’s what this means in practice. When a team member has six available focus blocks per week, you have two options:

1. Accelerate one project: Dedicate all six blocks to your most critical initiative.

2. Maintain two projects: Split the blocks evenly to keep both moving forward.

Most teams and leaders are going to choose #2. But before you split those blocks, you need to understand the hidden costs of running multiple projects.

The Hidden Cost of Multiple Projects

What you can’t do is spread those six blocks across four or five projects. This is where most teams go wrong — they try to advance too many projects simultaneously, ensuring none get enough focused attention to build momentum. The result is a lot of activity but very little meaningful progress.

What matters isn’t how many projects you’re juggling, but how many you’re actually finishing. In manufacturing, this is called throughput — the rate at which completed work flows through your system. And just like in manufacturing, trying to process too many things at once actually slows everything down.

Here’s what happens when teams try to maintain too many active projects:

• Every additional project multiplies status meetings and updates, creating a cascade of coordination overhead

• Team members spend more time shuffling between contexts than doing work, draining mental energy and focus

• Managing multiple stakeholders becomes an exhausting exercise in expectation management and communication

Two Paths to Better Capacity

When you start counting focus blocks, you’ll discover the uncomfortable truth that most teams only have 20-50% of their time available for strategic work. The rest goes to meetings, routine tasks, and communication. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it means you need to be ruthlessly realistic about how many projects you can actually advance.

This reality presents two strategic choices:

1. Work within your constraints: Accept your limited capacity (20-50% of total time) and ruthlessly prioritize which projects get those precious focus blocks. This means saying “not now” to good ideas so your best ideas can succeed. It might feel limiting at first, but it’s far better than pretending you have more capacity than you do.

2. Expand your capacity: Reshape your team habits to create more space for focus blocks by:

   • Eliminating unnecessary meetings and shortening essential ones

   • Establishing meeting-free days for deep work

   • Creating clear communication protocols that reduce interruptions

   • Setting boundaries around administrative work and email

Most teams need both approaches — immediate prioritization to stop the bleeding, followed by gradual optimization to reclaim more time. The key is starting with acceptance of your current capacity before trying to expand it.

Why Adding Headcount Often Backfires

At this point, many leaders reach for what seems like an obvious solution: “Let’s hire more people to free up focus blocks for our strategic work!” This intuitive response reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how focus blocks work in practice.

Here’s why adding headcount often makes things worse:

1. Hiring consumes focus blocks: A typical hire requires significant focused time from your existing team:

   • 2-3 blocks per week from HR/recruiting

   • 1-2 blocks per week from the hiring manager

   • 1 block per week from team members involved in interviews

2. Training creates a focus block deficit: New hires need mentoring and oversight, which means your experienced team members must redirect their focus blocks away from strategic work. This “focus block tax” often lasts 3-6 months, far longer than most leaders expect.

3. Coordination costs increase: Each additional team member creates new communication channels and dependencies, leading to more meetings and updates. What started as an attempt to free up focus blocks often ends up creating more coordination overhead.

Default to Subtraction Instead of Hiring

When I work with clients, my first move surprises them: instead of adding resources, we subtract projects. Here’s the process that consistently works:

1. Audit Your Focus Blocks

   • Map each team member’s available blocks across a typical week

   • Identify what’s currently consuming these blocks

   • Calculate your total strategic capacity in blocks per week

2. Right-Size Your Project Portfolio

   • List all current strategic projects and initiatives

   • Multiply each by 3 blocks per week to see total focus blocks needed

   • Compare with your available blocks

   • Cut projects until the math works, starting with the least critical

3. Protect and Optimize

   • Create team agreements around protecting focus blocks

   • Establish clear criteria for what constitutes a true strategic priority

   • Review meeting schedules quarterly to prevent calendar creep

   • Monitor focus block utilization as your key performance metric

This approach feels uncomfortable at first — most leaders resist cutting projects. But here’s the reality: in 80% of cases, teams dramatically increase their strategic output by concentrating their existing focus blocks on fewer priorities. The math is simple, but the discipline is hard.

The alternative is what we’re seeing across business today: rising burnout and disengagement as teams try to maintain too many priorities. Your team members will either burn out trying to do it all or quietly disengage, giving each project just enough attention to maintain the appearance of progress. Neither outcome serves your strategic goals.

---

Take the Team Habits Quiz to get a good place to start with improving your team’s performance and capacity.