Set the time you actually have, not the time you wish you had, and see if your posting plan holds up.
This tool checks one thing: whether the upload schedule you have in mind fits inside the hours you have. Not the hours you’d like to have. The ones left over once work, sleep and everything else are already accounted for.
Start with real hours, not free time
The first input is a weekly number: how much time the channel gets, honestly. Next to it, a buffer — 10, 20 or 30% — gets set aside before any of that time is available for production. A 20% buffer on 10 hours leaves 8 usable hours, and that 8 is what every later step gets measured against, not the original 10.
Below that, a day picker sets which days of the week carry any load at all. Days left unchecked stay at zero in the weekly view further down — they don’t get a fractional slice of the total just because the week has seven of them.
What a video costs, step by step
Each format — Shorts, a regular upload, long-form — expands into four separate numbers: recording, editing, thumbnail and title work, and the upload itself. A regular video built from an hour of recording, three hours of editing, half an hour on the thumbnail and title, and a quarter hour to publish comes to 4 hours 45 minutes. That’s the number that gets multiplied by how many of that format go out per week, fractional frequencies included — a monthly long-form is 0.25 a week, not zero.
One more choice sits under the format cards: which format matters most to protect. Pick one and the alternative schedules further down scale everything else first, leaving that format’s frequency untouched. Leave it on Balanced and every active format scales together.
What the channel costs beyond the videos
Planning, comments, analytics, admin. None of it produces a video, all of it takes time. That weekly number gets added on top of production load before anything is compared against the hours available.
The result
Required hours, usable capacity, and the gap between them turn into a score from 0 to 100 and one of three verdicts: Comfortable at 80 and up, Tight from 40 to 79, Overloaded below that. At 10 available hours, a 20% buffer, one regular video a week and 2 hours of overhead, that math lands at 6 hours 45 minutes required against 8 hours usable — a score of 89 and a Comfortable verdict, with about an hour and a quarter left over. Push past the usable ceiling and the verdict sentence adds a second line: how many days it takes, at the current shortfall, for the missing time to add up to a full extra week.
Underneath the score, a bar-by-bar breakdown shows exactly where the required hours go — each format’s weekly total, plus channel overhead, each as a share of the whole.
Where the load falls
The weekly strip only fills in on the days marked as work days, and only up to what an even split across those days would need — it’s a load spread across the week, not a shoot-by-shoot schedule.
Two more numbers before the alternatives
One is the ceiling: the most the current format mix could scale to before the week tips out of Comfortable, shown as a real frequency per format, not a multiplier. The other is a set of three ready-made scenarios — Light, Sustainable, Aggressive — built off the same math, each with its own verdict, so the difference between “half the current pace” and “the most it can take” is visible side by side.
Batching
Recording and packaging (thumbnail plus upload) can each be grouped into sessions of a set number of videos, applied to whichever format was set as priority. Editing is left out on purpose — grouping sessions saves the setup around a shoot or a publish, not the time spent cutting the footage itself, and the result line says so directly rather than folding it into one combined saving.
What if
Three steppers at the bottom move the numbers without touching the form above: more Shorts a week, more regular videos a week, or a percentage cut to editing time across every format. Everything above — the score, the breakdown, the ceiling, the alternatives — recalculates against the adjusted numbers until Reset puts them back.