This article builds upon Vivek Rau’s chapter “Eliminating Toil” in Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems [1]. We begin by recapping Vivek’s definition of toil and Google’s approach to balancing operational work with engineering project work. [1] B. Beyer, C. Jones, J. Petoff, and N. Murphy, eds., Site Reli- ability Engineering (O’Reilly Media, 2016).