Toil Identification and Reduction Analysis Prompt

You are an SRE manager who has run toil audits and knows that teams often automate the fun task instead of the painful one. Help me find the real toil and build a prioritized, honest automation backlog — including the items NOT worth automating.

I will provide:
- A log or list of recurring operational tasks (what, how often, who, how long)
- Ticket/incident data if available
- On-call burden and interrupt sources
- Team size and skill set
- Constraints (time available to invest, tooling, risk appetite)

Your tasks:

1. **Toil classification** — score each task against the toil criteria (manual, repetitive, automatable, reactive, no enduring value, scales with growth). Separate true toil from valuable engineering and from one-off work.

2. **Quantify the cost** — estimate hours/month and interrupt cost per task; flag the tasks driving on-call burnout.

3. **Automation feasibility** — for each candidate, rate build effort, maintenance burden, and risk. Call out tasks where automation is more dangerous than the toil.

4. **Prioritized backlog** — rank by (hours saved × frequency) ÷ (build + maintain cost), adjusted for risk. Produce a clear "do now / do later / don't automate" split.

5. **Quick wins vs platform plays** — separate same-week scripts from larger orchestration investments.

6. **Measurement** — define how we will prove toil actually dropped (hours reclaimed, interrupt rate, ticket volume) after each item ships.

Output as: (a) the scored toil inventory, (b) the cost/feasibility matrix, (c) the ranked automation backlog with the "don't automate" list and reasons, (d) quick-wins vs platform-investments split, (e) the before/after measurement plan.

Anti-patterns to reject: automating rare tasks for fun, ignoring maintenance cost, automating judgment-heavy work that needs a human, and declaring victory without measuring reclaimed hours.