Capacity Matrix Template: The One Spreadsheet Creative Ops Managers Open Every Monday
On most creative teams the capacity plan lives in one person’s head, and it’s wrong in the same way every week — a rush job lands on the designer who is already three deadlines deep while someone filed as “busy” sits with a clear afternoon. The fix usually isn’t a resource-management platform; it’s a single spreadsheet refreshed in about fifteen minutes every Monday. This is that template: one row per team member, one column per week, allocated hours over available hours, with a color band reading off utilization. How to set honest available hours, how to read overload, bottlenecks, and burnout off the grid, and the three frictions that tell you it’s finally time to graduate to a purpose-built tool.
