Balancing a workload based on commitments to projects includes monitoring messages in a collaboration system, the messages representing correspondences between users of the collaboration system, selecting a number of the users associated with the collaboration system to form a group of users, retrieving the messages from each of the users in the group of users, analyzing data associated with the messages to determine which of the messages relate to at least one project, and executing, based on a threshold, at least one action to optimize a workload for at least one user in the group of users for the at least one project.