Does anybody feel like they’re actually good at maintenance? As in, healthy attitude, motivation, good dopamine loops around stuff like paperwork, chores, boring repairs where you learn nothing new, doctor appointments, code documentation, inbox clearing...
What’s your secret?
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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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Being an optimist, I don't have maintenance mind.
My wife, a pessimist, LIVES in maintenance mind.
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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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Obsessively Type A, need everything to be perfect and done a certain way. (This is not me, btw)
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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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