If there's one thing I know everyone loves, it's maintenance. Ok, well, maybe not for most of us… but it is a very important activity, both in our daily lives and at work.

I’m sure you can imagine dozens of maintenance examples. I find the easiest ones to pull out are home-related - like laundry. I like having clean clothes to wear, which means I have to make time during my week to wash and fold laundry so it’s ready for next time (quadruply so with a few kids!). I am incredibly thankful that washing machines exist (I cannot imagine how long it took before these wonders), but I’m still required to take an hour or two out of my week to do it.

This is time I would much rather spend doing almost anything else. In the case of this particular type of maintenance, it’s also time I know will be quickly “used up” since those same clothes will appear in the laundry in the next week or two.

There are, however, many, many work-related examples of maintenance. When I manage projects I find myself having to organize notes, collect and scrub tickets, and remind folks for the ump-teenth time that something is needed. I certainly don’t wake up excited to perform these tasks, but they are 

There’s a quote from a TV show called Ricky and Morty about personal maintenance that resonated with me - “Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work”. In the context of the show this speaks to a character’s need for constant life-or-death situations.  (Hopefully) most of use will never be in one of those, but maintenance is still just work.  There’s rarely anything exciting about folding a shirt, or reviewing meeting notes, or reading server logs to find a bug.

Sooo why do it?

It’s boring and repetitive, so you may be thinking why would we choose to do maintenance?  Well, it’s worth it. If I don’t clean my laundry I won’t have clothes to wear (I’m told this is something to avoid). If we don’t change the oil in our car the engine will wear down and break. If we don’t restart our computers for new updates we’ll get hacked.

In short - we tolerate it’s annoyance to avoid worse consequences later.

So what do we do about it

Personally I’ve found that maintenance itself really can’t be made to be fun.  We can outsource some/most of it, however, there will always be SOME maintenance-related tasks we have to do personally.  We can, however, do some things to make it more bearable, or at least slightly enjoyable:

1. Make it a game - I find this works well with a group (or with a few kids…), but set each person against each other to see who can do the most maintenance, accurately, the quickest.

2. Get a reward - As a kid my reward for doing chores was an allowance… As an adult my reward for doing chores can go beyond completing the task.

3. Do it as a team - These boring tasks can go a lot quicker (but subjectively and objectively) when done as a group. Put on some music and get your team together and knock out that boring data entry. Get a friend to help with that thing you’ve been putting off.  Maintenance goes faster, together.

Conclusion

At the end of the day maintenance isn’t going anywhere. Machines still need an oil change. Clothes still need to be folded. Meeting notes need to be archived and never read. All that said, it serves an important function in keeping things running smoothly - and if no one ever complains about an issue because I performed boring maintenance, I’ll call that a win.