Toil at Home: What Operations Thinking Teaches Us About Daily Routines
Operations teams have a precise word for a specific kind of work: toil. It describes tasks that are manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical rather than strategic, and that scale linearly with growth. Toil produces no lasting value. Every hour spent on it has to be spent again tomorrow. The reason the concept is useful is not that toil is difficult. It is that toil is invisible in the metrics that matter to management, so it accumulates quietly until people burn out.