Make maintenance your new productivity metric

In many workplaces, “productive” means creating something new. But in living systems, growth without upkeep is a pathology. Ecology and infrastructure both show that cycles of care keep complex things alive. When you schedule a maintenance power hour, you trade the sugar high of novelty for the steady fuel of continuity.

Consider the art world’s lesson: elevating maintenance reveals labor that culture tends to hide. When you wash museum steps or shake thousands of hands to honor sanitation workers, you shift attention from the shiny to the sustaining. In psychology, this reframes reward. Instead of chasing only visible wins, you reward actions that prevent breakdowns and enable others to flourish.

A micro‑anecdote from a small studio: they added a weekly systems hour to clean tools, back up files, and leave notes for Monday. Within a month, they cut Monday chaos in half and quietly improved relationships because fewer small failures rolled downhill to others. I might be wrong, but it seems that treating maintenance as a first‑class task turns you from a firefighter into a gardener.

Systems theory and reliability engineering back this up. Preventive maintenance reduces variance and increases capacity. Habit science says a named slot and tight scope lower resistance. Socially, public gratitude for maintainers builds norms where care is seen, not exploited. Your calendar becomes a statement: keeping things alive is productive.

List neglected upkeep across work and home, then block a recurring weekly hour to do nothing but maintenance—clean tools, back up files, document steps, check in with a person who holds things together. During that hour, do one public thank‑you to a maintainer to make care visible, and jot one line about what breakdown you avoided or flow you enabled so the value stays clear. Protect the hour like any critical meeting, because it is one. Try it this Friday and notice how Monday feels.