Many of the listeners of DeveloperT have probably heard of the marshmallow test. The basic idea of the marshmallow test is to have a, uh, in, in the test, at least have a child sit down.
although I think I would probably struggle with this as an adult and set in front of them.
Something that would give them immediate gratification.
Marshmallows are a pretty good example of this.
You could do with a cookie or really anything with sugar and let them know that they can either have the marshmallow, the single marshmallow now, or they can wait for you to return and double their marshmallow treat.
Now the interesting thing is that the return never happens.
The behavior of the children is documented and many of them fail.
They fail to wait. Many of them not only fail but choose to eat the marshmallow immediately.
And so the outcome from this, and many other experiments after the marshmallow test, all worked to reinforce the same basic premise.
People discount future gains.
This idea is called hyperbolic discounting and it's been studied many times over.
A dollar now is generally speaking more interesting than a dollar tomorrow.
But more insightfully, a dollar now may be, depending on your particular shape of discounting curve, A dollar now may be more interesting to you than two dollars tomorrow.
But I want to take this concept and fill it out a little bit more, and talk about how it might apply in our daily lives.
Tonight when I finish recording this episode, I have a plan to change the strings on my guitar.
I actually have a couple of guitars and they all are in need of new strings.
If you don't know, guitars over time, the strings become a little bit less lively.
They're less enjoyable to play.
They're more likely to break, but it happens progressively.
It happens slowly over time.
and so it's very easy to, when that kind of degradation begins, ignore it, to put it off.
There's other more important things than changing my guitar strings.
It seems in the moment like a low priority item, and I can justify it by saying, well, the strings that I have still have some life left in them.
I'm gonna keep playing the ones that I have. But the truth is that every time I play on a degraded string I'm getting less of an experience out of playing my guitar.
Of course there's probably some optimal degradation point at which now I should change the strings, but almost every time I tend not to.
I tend to let it go until it is far beyond that point.
Why is that? Well in another area you might find yourself not making your bed every day.
You may find yourself allowing trash to pile up on your desk or perhaps you are cleaner than the average person.
But you haven't taken care of your development environment.
Maybe you have old, krafty code laying around.
Maybe you're like me and you have shortcuts that keep on running on your iPhone that don't do anything useful anymore.
You have a pile of reminders that you haven't cleared out of the backlog of your phone.
or pretty much everyone I know falls in this category.
You have thousands of emails that probably you'll never read and are not really useful to you, but keep on nagging you with that red notification icon on your phone.
All of these things fall into a similar category.
These are items of disrepair.
In our work, we see this and we often label it tech dead.
But there's also other types of work that might fall into this category, things like automation, things like improving your IDE, setting your personal development environment up, setting up those key bindings, actually taking the time to do the key bindings the way you like them.
These are all things that we put at the very bottom of our list. Why?
Because we have much more important things to do.
Tomorrow is my son's 8th birthday, and in the morning, I've already told myself tonight, that I'm going to make my bed.
Why is that? Why would I take the time on my son's 8th birthday, instead of spending the time with him, why would I take the time to make my bed?
Someone could easily say that that can't be the most important way to spend your time and therefore you should de -prioritize that.
Put it at the bottom of the list. There may be days where that's the case, but in this episode I hope to convince you that these tasks are indeed important.
Not only because of the internal sense of pride that you might get for sticking to a particular commitment that you made, although that has its own value, but also because it changes the quality of the other things you do.
Adding one more to the list, hopefully this will provide a little bit of extra insight, changing your air filter.
The reason why I decided to add this one at the end is to discuss this modifier quality of this kind of work.
If you changed your air filter now, when will you benefit?
The intuitive answer is probably right now.
Of course I'll benefit now because my air quality will improve.
The truth is that you're going to benefit now and as long as the air filter lasts and if you change the air filter again, this is the interesting part, there may be no change in the benefit.
This is why maintenance often goes unnoticed.
A maintenance paradox.
When maintenance is being run properly, when you are changing your filters when you're supposed to, no one will notice the difference.
You won't notice the difference.
If I were to change my guitar strings every three weeks, let's say, that's a pretty aggressive strategy I may never notice any degradation on the strings at all.
And so the maintenance itself, let's say it was performed by somebody else entirely without any of my knowledge, I may never know that they're doing it.
It becomes invisible.
And so we don't get the same kind of gratification out of consistent maintenance.
This is kind of a reverse training or reverse incentive.
If you wanna think about it that way, because if we do wait until we can notice there is some kind of benefit to that action.
We get a training, a sense of training, that waiting and then performing the maintenance gives us a positive improvement.
We feel the change.
So these factors, the fact that we have this tendency to discount whatever is not going to give us immediate gratification, we tend to devalue that relative to other options that will give us immediate gratification.
That's going to provide friction to maintenance.
Additionally, in order to get into a good habit of maintenance, You have to kind of deregulate yourself a little bit from the dopamine rush that happens if you don't keep up with your maintenance.
A good example of this is somebody who lets their closet get out of control.
I might know someone who does this on a cycle.
It's not my wife. It's me.
I tend to allow my closet to pile up.
This is a bad habit that I have that I'd like to change.
The trouble is, that very often I end up training myself with a rush of dopamine.
Once I've allowed my closet to pile up, once I've thrown my shoes on the ground instead of putting them on the shelf enough times, there is a sense of relief that comes whenever I finally do get around to cleaning it.
And so I have this bad cycle.
this is training me that it's okay.
That it's okay to let stuff sit on the floor because the marginal benefit, the marginal benefit of cleaning it now, of picking my shoes up immediately doesn't provide me enough of an immediate gratification and if I do allow it to pile up, eventually I do get that larger reward. So it's kind of a Catch -22, this maintenance paradox.
But there's yet another force that makes maintenance difficult.
And this is a little bit of a newer theory in psychology.
It's called the Control Level Theory.
And it comes from a paper, and I'm going to attempt to say these names.
I may say them incorrectly.
Please forgive me if I do.
Yaakov Trope and Mira Lieberman wrote a paper about construal -level theory of psychological distance.
And the basic idea presented in this paper is that we construe the connection of our actions.
For example, we have a cognitive construal.
And construal kind of means that we're distancing ourselves.
There's different kinds of distances that they talk about.
Specifically, they talk about temporal distance that is distance in time.
They talk about spatial distance that is literal physical space.
They talk about social distance that is the things that I do don't affect me, but rather they might affect someone else or this action may affect someone in a social group, and then, finally, hypothetical distance.
Each of these applies to this concept of maintenance.
We've already talked about the idea of temporal discounting, which is a direct example of temporal distancing.
That is, because we have this temporal discounting that is the value happens sometime in the future, the value of this action is disconnected from me or it is less valuable than something, less immediate value than some other action.
If I were to do maintenance then I'm not gonna have the same immediate value as some other action I might take.
Right? The temporal distance here, it creates that, or it's created by that discounting, right?
So, we're creating a little bit of distance between ourselves and the value that we feel from the action that we're taking.
Similarly, you know, spatial distance is a little bit of a hard one to talk about with maintenance.
But we've all experienced this feeling.
For example, it's likely that areas that are further away in your house, for example, an attic or a basement, are going to be in more disrepair than areas that are closer to you.
And that's not any difference necessarily in terms of ownership or who's responsible for those spaces.
and it's just that it is much closer physically to you.
The concept of social distance, and I'm not talking about social distancing as we learned during the COVID era, but social distance in this case would mean that the actions that we're taking, let's say for example, a maintenance action in a code base that we're responsible for, But that we are not necessarily going to keep being responsible for, right?
Perhaps, the effect that our code has on another team, there's gonna be some distance there because we're not impacted directly or as directly as someone else is.
And then finally and perhaps most interestingly for maintenance is the hypothetical distance.
This one is especially profound for maintenance because this goes directly to the idea of preventing or a statistical effect.
If I were to change the strings on my guitar, then I am preventing the experience of playing on dead strings.
This is what gives that feeling of distance, right?
It gives that maintenance paradox.
It creates that maintenance paradox that we never actually feel the distance because it's the hypothetical distance.
It is the hypothetical distance that we are preventing.
It's hard to know exactly how valuable a given bit of work will be because we never actually experienced the downside.
The prevention kept us from experiencing the downside.
So we can measure, potentially, we could measure what our hypothetical losses would have been had we not put that measure in place, but very often the effort to measure hypothetical losses is not undertaken.
Instead, we measure our real losses that are happening in another area.
And so maintenance ends up being deprioritized while reactive work gets higher priority.
This is a simple effect of visibility in this case.
It's much more visible when we have real losses rather than hypothetical losses.
And again this comes back to that construal theory, this construal level theory that the hypothetical distance is going to be less present to us.
It's going to be less impactful, less important to us.
So all of these are friction to maintenance.
What do we do about this?
What do we do about all of these effects?
Maintenance becomes a part of how you behave. Let me say this again.
Maintenance becomes a standard practice, a standard operating practice in how you behave. So, you know, another way to think about this is it becomes habitual.
It becomes habitual.
Why am I making my bed in the morning, tomorrow?
Why am I making my bed in the morning tomorrow on my son's eighth birthday instead of immediately going to spend time with him?
I'm going to get up and make my bed.
It's because I will experience the important parts of my day differently.
It's not just about the bed, it's about creating an environment for me that is calm and serene.
making my bed allows me to feel a sense of control.
And there's a lot of other ways that you may apply this.
And psychologically speaking, not all maintenance is going to have the same psychological effect, right?
So this is, for me personally, it will enhance the time that I do spend with my son.
The quality of that time will be improved In the same way that if tomorrow afternoon during his birthday party, we're gonna go swim in a swimming pool.
I'm going to stop and put on sunscreen.
This is a maintenance, a preventive measure.
It's going to prevent future pain for me.
I've had sunburns plenty of times in my life.
I don't want to experience one tomorrow.
And so instead of immediately jumping in and having fun, instead of getting right in the pool and later having to pay for how fast I wanted to get into the pool, I'm going to take the time and perform that basic maintenance as a matter of habit in order to deal with that hypothetical value, the hypothetical distance between the ideal experience, right?
I'm going to prevent a burn.
So the whole framework here, the idea is to help you understand that maintenance is unlikely to happen through our typical prioritization structures.
It's very hard to convince ourselves because of all of these different biases and things like the control level theory, the fact that we have this temporal discounting, this hyperbolic temporal discounting.
All of these things are friction to us performing these maintenance type duties.
The kind of work that feels marginal.
It feels low value in the moment.
Very likely, if you were to pull out your Eisenhower matrix, And if you listen to the show, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
If you are a new listener, go Google Eisenhower Matrix, as you've probably heard of it.
This would fit squarely in the important but not urgent category.
These kinds of tasks are important, but they are usually not urgent until they become urgent until your strings break on stage, until your room is so messy, or until your bed has not been made for so long, that you can't find the sheet, right?
That the disrepair begins to become overwhelming.
So I encourage you to adopt a maintenance mindset.
Adopt maintenance habits.
Now it's an exercise I'll leave up to you to determine to what degree.
That is the balance that you have to use your own frameworks and wisdom and insight to determine.
But it is unlikely to happen through a singular frame.
You are unlikely to participate in these behaviors through basic prioritization Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea.
I appreciate you making time for this podcast today.
This is unlikely to be the very most important thing that you'll do today.
I hope that this can act as somewhat of a maintenance behavior in your career and in your professional life and beyond.
I very much appreciate the audience who listens to the show, the people, the engineers and and software developers, the designers, everyone who listens to the show, you make it worthwhile to make this podcast each and every week.
So thank you so much for listening.
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Come and check it out at developertea .com slash Discord, that is free, and it will always be free.
Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.
