The only reason we can't book 4 hours of time a day is because our employers run "lean" and completely neglect to scale out personnel along with projects. I kn

The only reason we can't book 4 hours of time a day is because our employers run "lean" and completely neglect to scale out personnel along with projects. I know people who would absolutely be replaced by 3 people if they quit. My advice? Advocate for yourself, because your boss and their boss doesn't actually have any clue how much work it is in the trenches. Management is almost never aware of all that much about what you're doing, and a lot of capacity issues like this eventually bubble up and catch them by complete surprise simply because individual contributors have just been silently dealing with the frog-boiling. This all means you should: 1. Come up with specific and measurable justification in terms of hours/dollars for why you need more employees as the company and therefore your workload grows 2. "Offer" to push back excess work and give your management choices while doing so: "Project A will take us X hours over capacity for next quarter, should I prioritize Project A or Project B? We can only deliver # projects in the next quarter at our current staffing level." Blocking off time on your calendar doesn't really solve the problem because it's something that a lot of people, especially customer-facing ones, simply can't do without doing everything I described above.