What does it mean that operational debt?

Deferred maintenance on your systems accumulates and eventually causes failures.

Example: You skip your weekly review for three consecutive weeks because 'nothing urgent is broken.' By week four, your task manager has forty-seven uncategorized items, your calendar has double-booked two meetings, a bill autopay failed silently because you never updated the card on file, and you spend your entire Saturday morning untangling commitments you cannot remember making. Three hours of deferred fifteen-minute reviews cost you an entire day of recovery — plus the late fee, the missed meeting, and the frayed trust with two colleagues who expected you to show up.

Try this: Open every system you operate — your task manager, calendar, email inbox, filing system, financial tracker, notes app. For each one, write down one piece of maintenance you have been deferring. Estimate how long the maintenance would take if you did it today. Then estimate how long recovery will take if you defer it another month. The gap between those two numbers is the interest rate on that specific operational debt. Pick the item with the highest interest rate and do it now.