[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Glue work is a term from Tanya Reilly’s 2019 talk and essay “Being Glue”: the noticing-and-fixing, coordinating, documenting, and unblocking that holds a project together but produces no shippable artifact of its own. Its defining problem is a recognition gap. It is critical to the team and nearly invisible to the rubrics that decide promotions and headcount, so the people who do it are valued in the moment and overlooked at review time. It is distinct from toil (glue work is often judgment-heavy, not repetitive) but shares toil’s core pathology: work that is essential and unmeasured gets chronically under-resourced. That shared mechanism, invisible-therefore-unfunded, is why it connects to Managing Toil. Seeded from Managing Toil.