Hey there podcast listeners, we've been hard at work producing all kinds of new episodes

and special series which you'll be hearing in the coming weeks. Sometimes it's so labor-intensive

that we need to take the week off from a new episode and put out something from the archive.

That's what we're doing this week. We always try to find something that we really think you'd

want to hear again, or if you aren't a fanatical every episode listener, something we think

is really worth hearing for the first time. Today's episode fits that description. It's called

In Praise of Maintenance. Hope you enjoy.

A while back I got obsessed with the notion of maintenance. A really notion of how much time

maintenance takes. You go to the gym to maintain your body so it can do what you need it to do.

Maybe you go to a doctor, an dentist, and a therapist too. You spend a third of your life

sleeping so your brain can do what it needs to do. Think about all the time and resources that

go into maintaining your work life, the meetings, the memos, the productivity apps. Of course,

there's also your personal life to maintain. I got so obsessed with the burden of all this maintenance

that I decided to precisely track how many minutes I was spending of each day on different forms

of maintenance versus all the other things I was trying to accomplish. But after just a couple days,

I quit this ridiculous exercise because it had become just another maintenance task that kept

me from doing this stuff I really wanted to be doing. I decided that maintenance was simply a curse

that had to be accommodated. That, unless I thought about it, the happier I'd be. And then I read

something that changed my mind completely. Our thesis basically is that our culture's obsession with

innovation and hype has led us to neglect maintenance and maintainers. Today, on freaking out

the comics radio, in praise of maintenance. Because there's not only a need but a certain

nobility in taking care of what you've already created. And maybe we shouldn't look at maintenance

...