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I get that some people are driven by a strong sense of duty/responsibility/piety but what if you entirely lack those traits? I can do some guilt, fear, anxiety, panic, but they don’t seem like healthy ways to stay on top of maintenance work
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A good measure of the amount of the non-routine maintenance you have in your life is the number of account numbers and passwords. Routine maintenance (eg. folding laundry) can be made pleasant. Non-routine is much harder.
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Any maintenance that requires dealing with an account number/password is by definition a rare or exceptional kind of event, like filing taxes or calling customer service because a thing broke.
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You can make it routine by investing in serious personal workflow systems (ie automation) but now you have 2 problems. I think that's why my disciplined GTD-ing from my 30s pretty much broke down in my 40s. Even something as simple as GTD for personal workflow can become too much
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There' something there, but I suspect it's not not that simple. You have to have a sense that what you have is worth preserving, which is an optimistic attitude towards it -- that it will be worth as much or more in the future. And there are pessimists who hate maintenance too.
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This is totally me for the pw-type tasks you’re describing 😛 easy to stay on top of, “prevention” to avoid a future need for cure, easy to check off the to-do list bc they’re relatively mindless. In our house I do that “admin” stuff, spouse does hands-on type stuff (dishes)
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