Toil
Operational work that tends to be manual, repetitive, and automatable.
Operational work that tends to be manual, repetitive, and automatable.
## "Work That No One Wants to Do" **Toil** is the kind of work that scales linearly with service growth. If you double your users, and you have to double your manual work, that is Toil. ### Identifying Toil Work is Toil if it is: 1. **Manual**: Hands-on keyboard. 2. **Repetitive**: Doing the same thing over and over. 3. **Automatable**: A machine *could* do it. 4. **Tactical**: No long-term value. 5. **No Enduring Value**: The work stops as soon as you stop doing it. ### The 50% Rule Google SREs aim to spend **max 50% of time on Toil** and **min 50% on Engineering** (building automation). If Toil exceeds 50%, you stop shipping features and build robots.
ExThe Manual Onboarding
"A team manually ran SQL queries to provision new enterprise customers. It took 30 minutes per customer."
Why Toil Matters
Toil is the enemy of engineering productivity. High toil means less time for feature work.
Google SRE principles suggest keeping toil under 50% of total work.