the inevitability of ops

Operations work is inevitable, even in your most creative work. If you want your stuff to serve people beyond you, and especially if you want to offer an elastic supply of your stuff, so that you give more of it when people want more of it, you need reliable ways to turn ideas into stuff. That’s ops.

If you are doing something several times, you are building a machine to do that thing, whether you think of it that way or not. This means you also get to (get to! not have to) practice maintenance - you keep the machine in working order, replace and upgrade parts, run tests of its performance. Up to you whether that maintenance is a romantic endeavor that receives the shine and respect of your creative work or a drudge. That’s a question of attitude and values. 

It’s also up to you whether you give due attention to the machine. Maybe you can do just fine with minimum viable ops. You don’t need fancy gear or tightly engineered workflows. 

But it’s quite possible you can find more time to make the stuff you love making and you can make more of it for more potential fans if you go into the phonebooth and come out with your COO cape on and a prompt for GPT 5 Thinking or Claude Opus 4.1, even for an afternoon. 

“If I thought of my work to produce [x] the way a world-class engineer or COO would, what are the machines or systems I’m relying on? What is my supply chain? What are my stocks and flows? Based on what you know of my work from our conversations and [these uploaded documents / calendar links], where could I enhance these operations, so my product is better and I can efficiently deliver more of it?”

-eric