ALM #047: Why Toil is ruining your team

How should you deal with Toil work?

Hey there 👋🏼

In today’s email:

• Toil: This is ruining your org

• DeveloperWeek Europe: An exciting event.

• Post of the week: 5-star on social media.

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TOIL

This is a well-known term in tech.

Every time your team stops their sprint programmed tasks to focus on grunt, repeatable and automatable work, it's probably toil.

At first, these are just a couple of harmless manual tasks, but before you know it, your team is swamped with meaningless tasks that occupy nothing more than time and produce no value.

Let's move this into a practical example.

Imagine you have a web server that usually fills up its disk because the .tmp folder gets bigger and bigger. Have you lived through this?

With this scenario in your mind, let's see the definition that Google has for toil tasks:

• Manual - You stop everything you're doing and manually clean that folder.

• Repeatable - This keeps happening; you must revisit that folder every few weeks.

• Automatable - Can you create a script that does this automatically? Can you reduce the amount of interaction you have with this task?

• Reactive/Non-Tactical - You stop everything you're doing to look at this disk space scenario. Is this truly the best you're doing with your time?

• No enduring value - If you do nothing else, going in and cleaning that folder has no value considering that you'll have to do the same in a couple of weeks. Why is that folder filling up? Why not attack the root cause?

• Don't scale - It's all fine when you have one webserver. What about 1000? How does this scale?

Think about your reality.

It's almost independent of what field you work in. There's always toil work.

A great representation of what toil does to us.

I tend to get annoyed when I have to do things recurrently. If automation is possible, I always try to script my way through work.

What tasks and work do you do that is, in fact, toil work?

Once you clearly label your toil tasks, you can then move into a data approach:

• How many toil tasks did you do in the past week? What about the past month? And the past year?

• How does that translate into time? How much time is toil taking from you?

The first part of dealing with a problem is accepting that you have a problem, and for you to do that, you need to understand toil and how it affects your daily work.

You should now be able to:

• Review which of these tasks are automatable.

• How long it will take you to automate them.

This second point is critical.

Contrary to popular belief, not everything is worth automating.

Let's say that you take 4 hours automating a task that manually takes 1 minute to perform.

That means that only after 240 tasks do you move into the profit zone.

Only you know if this is worth it. If you have 50 tasks like this yearly, I highly doubt it's valuable. However, the return will be swift if you have 1000 tasks a month.

Look, this isn't always a slam dunk, but you need to look over your team as a leader.

Toil has clear adverse effects on a team:

• Meaningless tasks

• Constant context switching

• Reduces team capacity

• Non-strategic focus

It's important to remind you that, in the same way, you shouldn't aim for 100% availability. You shouldn't seek 0% toil work.

Toil tasks will eventually appear. Your goal as the team leader is to keep them manageable.

So now I ask, have you ever considered toil? How much toil do you do on your day-to-day? How about your team? How affected are they by toil tasks?

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DEVELOPERWEEK EUROPE 2023

I’m happy to announce that I will be a Featured Speaker at DeveloperWeek Europe 2023.

I will share my views on how we, Engineering Leaders, should deal with this crazy environment the Tech Industry faces.

We’re usually asked to do more with less. How about if we change it and try to do better?

This will be the topic on April 26th.

Check the link below for more information.

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POST OF THE WEEK

A couple of weeks ago, we had the privilege to get Kelsey Hightower at a fireside chat at FARFETCH.

I'm not even going to get into how amazing the chat was, but I want to focus on something that he said, which is still resonating with me after several weeks.

Be more than you HR Title.

Kelsey Hightower

How often are we sidetracked by office politics, promotions, or the lack of them?

How often do we lose focus over small, petty things?

I know that this was a line in a middle of a conversation, but if you think about it, it’s a pretty deep one!

Well done, Kelsey!