Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. We're always hearing about innovation and

disruption and the new new thing and a lot of that stuff is wonderful, but I've been thinking lately that we tend to overlook something equally important, maybe more important, maintaining what we've already built.

And then I remembered that we made an episode about this idea back in 2016 called

In Praise of Maintenance.

So we went back into the archive, dust it off, that episode updated facts and figures as necessary,

and today we are playing it for you as a bonus episode.

I'd love to know what you think.

Our email is Radio at Freconomics. As always, thanks for listening.

A while back, I got obsessed with the notion of maintenance or 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 and a dentist and a therapist too.

You spend a third of your life sleeping so your brain can do what it needs to do.

And 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 the less 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

...