I think bandwidth is a very good English word especially when it’s used to ask if people have the time and energy to do something. I don’t think there is a counterpart for this word in Chinese as usually in Chinese we will ask people directly if they have time or energy to do something, or with a “please” at the end of the ask to be more polite, but it does not sound as good as bandwidth from my feeling.
The answer to bandwidth is either yes or no and it comes to another question of life philosophy: how we arrange our capacity and the tasks in our daily life. We can try to complete more challenging tasks that are beyond our capacity, or we can only choose tasks that below what we are capable of. These are the choices we need to face each and every day but different choices will lead to totally different lives. If the tasks we choose are too challenging, we might get discouraged again and again and it can even shake our confidence towards the future. If the tasks are too easy, we might not get enough opportunities to get challenged and improvement to become better ourselves. The best choice would be to mix challenging and easy tasks based on our capacity so that we can both get challenged and find our opportunity areas and also the sense of achievement. But how to balance it? Well, that is a complicated question that can not be answered in one or two sentences. Actually, it seems to be one of the core philosophies of the whole traditional Chinese history and there is another famous Chinese word for this, Du. Du means the balance between two opposite extremes, like Yin and Yang, cold and warm, etc. I am not sure if there is a counterpart for this in English world and other cultures, but I think people from other cultures are talking about this concept as well.
But how to do it better, if we don’t have general standards? Well, the first thing I think is we need to treat it as dynamic, meaning we can’t expect there is a rule and if we stick to this rule, it can get us whatever we want and complete whatever we need to. It will depend on the surrounding environments, people we are working with, our moods and physical status, etc. All those things matter. And if we can always have this foundation with us before we handle our tasks and balance the tasks and our capacity, I think that will be a good start.