As a professor, a researcher, and a practitioner, for most of the past 10 years, I worked best when I kept those intersecting parts of my life separate. I had one overall system for managing everything, but I kept three separate calendars because that helped me compartmentalize each role and made the workload feel manageable. Last fall, however, the systems and guardrails I had in place started bursting at the seams and no longer worked. At first, I blamed the new class I had taken on, and to be fair, that was part of it. Like a rookie professor, I gave the students way too much to do over the semester, mainly because it was a heavy upper level theory course, and I had built a lot into it. Yet, the interesting thing was that teaching (the grading, recording of lectures, interacting with students, etc.) was not the part that was draining me; I actually loved it and got energized by it. What I started noticing instead was that there were other parts of my day to day that still had to get done, but they were sucking the life out of me by consuming so much of my time and mental bandwidth. I started to rethink the way I worked, and for the first time in a very long time, instead of watching yet another YouTube video by Ali Abdaal or reading another productivity hack on how to manage my three calendars to try to squeeze more into an already full system, I started asking a different question: What did I have capacity for?
That question changed both how I worked and how I viewed my intersecting professional identities. Beyond managing energy that naturally ebbs and flows, I had to ask myself what I honestly had the capacity to carry mentally, emotionally, professionally, and practically, not what I could technically squeeze in, what I had done before, or what I felt obligated to keep doing simply because it had always been part of my life. This came against the backdrop of reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which had already pushed me to think more seriously about the limits of time and the impossibility of doing everything. I made a list of all my key responsibilities to assess where I stood capacity wise, and I realized that some things I was still carrying had followed me from graduate school (almost 10 years ago). At one point, they made sense for who I was, where I was going, and what I was trying to build as an international student. Back then and in some regard even today, I was still passionate about them, and they served a purpose in that particular season of my life, but I am a totally different person now, with different responsibilities, priorities, and demands on my time. Unfortunately, what I had to accept, somewhat reluctantly, was that some of those commitments no longer fit the identity I had grown into or, ironically, the direction I was trying to go and what I was now trying to build as someone entering midcareer.
That realization was reinforced when I later read a Fast Company article by Keisha McCotry that argued for starting not with goals but with capacity. That framing landed differently for me because it gave language to what I had already begun to notice; the issue was no longer how I managed my time or even my energy, it was whether the life I had built still matched what I realistically had the capacity to sustain. Around that same time, I was talking with a mentor of mine, and she asked me to walk her through what a perfect day would look like. I proudly told her that I would do research on a Tuesday, answer student emails on a Wednesday, get 8 hours of sleep every night, work out consistently, grade papers on a Friday, and have my weekends to myself to frolic around the place, all while working a standard 9–5, spending time with family and traveling the world. She held my hands and calmly said, “There are no perfect days, and I may not always get 8 hours of sleep.” (:O What do you mean there are no perfect days?) She then showed me her color-coded calendar, which reflected all of who she was: a physician, an advocate, and a researcher. Then she asked me a simple question: Why had I never merged my calendars, considering I was one person, not three separate people?
This was definitely an aha moment for me (and hopefully this article comes full circle for you as you connect the dots at the start of this editorial). That realization reshaped the way I approached work. As McCotry (2026) said verbatim in her article, “Capacity is not just time on a calendar. It is energy, focus, decision bandwidth, and emotional resilience. It is also deeply personal and deeply contextual.” I started thinking less about how to fit everything in on my three calendars and more about what actually deserved space in my life now. I began filtering my commitments through a capacity lens as one person, not three separate professional identities: Some things needed to be sustained, some redesigned, and some released altogether.
That is, in many ways, what this issue is about. At the individual level, several contributions invite us to think about what people realistically have the capacity to carry. “Preparing People for Uncertainty, Not Just Employment,” and “Workscapes 2.0” ask us to think about uncertainty, recovery, creativity, and the demands placed on our finite attention and energy. Others, including “When Talent Compensates for the System, Beyond the Wellness Hype,” and “Why Leadership Matters,” turn our attention toward the systems, leadership practices, and organizational conditions that shape what people are realistically able to sustain. In addition, pieces such as “Domain Entanglement, Military and Veteran I-O Work Series,” and “Max Classroom Capacity” challenge us to reconsider professional boundaries, training practices, and long-standing assumptions that may no longer fit the careers, workplaces, or profession we are trying to build. Last, President Richard Landers’ column, “All About That Website,” brings that same question to SIOP itself, illustrating what can happen when a system designed for one set of needs continues accumulating new functions and expectations over time. His column asks us to consider not only how we maintain what already exists but when capacity requires us to redesign the system altogether. Taken together, these pieces remind us that capacity goes beyond finding a way to do more and instead being more intentional about what we make room for, what we ask of ourselves and others, and what may need to change along the way.
In case you are wondering where I am on this journey, it has been almost a year, and I am still learning what this looks like in practice through trial, error, and experimentation. My calendars are now merged, but the larger lesson has been less about the calendars themselves and more about becoming comfortable with the fact that there may never be one perfect system. What works in one season may not work in the next, and that does not necessarily mean the system failed but sometimes that we changed. I am learning to pay closer attention to those changes and to adjust before everything starts bursting at the seams again. My hope is that this issue encourages you to do the same, more specifically to notice what your current season is asking of you and to give yourself permission to respond accordingly.
Until next time … Happy fall y’all, and I’ll see you on the next one….
Dr Will.i.am
Reference
McCotry, K. (2026). An AI strategist explains why she stopped setting New Year’s goals. Fast Company.
