It’s that time of year where you may feel pressured to pick your New Year’s resolutions. Well, we went ahead and tried to give you a head start. 2023 is the year we tame toil so we can focus on the fun stuff like engineering and innovation. Hopefully you have had the chance to follow along with us for the month of December for Seasons Freezings, the time of year you are locked out of production, so you have time to explore new ideas like automation 🙂.

IT Operations has always been difficult. There is always too much work to do—and not enough time to do it. The frequent interruptions and high levels of toil certainly don’t help. Moreover, there is relentless pressure from executives that question why everything takes too long, breaks too often, and costs too much. In search of improvement, we have repeatedly bet on new tools to improve our work.

How many of us can say with confidence that we know a tool inside and out? If you’re like most, you probably use just a small fraction of a product’s features. When it comes to feature-rich software like Microsoft Word or Excel, it’s a safe bet that most users are aware of less than half of the features, and use even less on a regular basis. And the longer we’ve been using a piece of software, the more likely we fall into this trap of feature underutilization.

Our industry has always had localized expressions for work that was necessary but didn’t move the company forward. The SRE movement calls this type of work “toil.” The concept of toil is a unifying force because it provides an impartial framework for identifying — then containing — the work that takes up our time, blocks people from fulfilling their engineering potential, and doesn’t move the company forward.