In a Fit of Maintenance

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~300 word | ~2 min read

It’s always interesting when your work shows up at home. I recently wrote about how Leftover Maintenance Become Unplanned Work. And in fact I encountered just such a situation at home… in my own breaker box.

It all started with my wife calling me upstairs. None of the kids’ bedroom lights would turn on, nor the hallway. Yet the study, also upstairs, did light up. So I checked the breaker-box. None of the breakers were tripped, but worse… there was a large set simply labelled ‘General Lighting’. Very helpful. So in a fit of maintenance, I begin debugging, tracing the circuits and documenting as I go. What started as a simple ‘bug fix’ turned into a mutli-step process to pay-down technical debt. That included documentation and replacing one unrelated, but broken light switch in a different part of the house. Talk about an object lesson in technical debt!

Now, I noticed a couple of things about this scenario. At the end, I was winded, and exhilarated. I had fixed several annoyances that had been around for months or years… but I hadn’t yet solved the problem. All I did was find the right breaker to flip. We ended up calling an electrician for help, it was a loose connection. Still, in the moment, I felt accomplished. I finally addressed a couple things that had been bothering me! But it took the situation being bad enough to get me to change. It wasn’t planned intentional practice. My ‘Fit of Maintenance’ was an anti-pattern emerging from consistently de-prioritizing maintenance work in favor of… anything else. So my feeling of ‘this was good, I might do this again’ was somewhat misleading.

I know from my study, and even my own writing, I need to make maintenance a consistent habit. Yet, even for myself, I don’t personally want to do it. Meaning that effective maintenance is a discipline. And even though my ‘Fit of Maintenance’ produced good, it cannot create the kind of long-term good I know I want to seek. And if it’s happening at home… I’ll need to take a long hard look at my own work process too.