Create and Maintain

Posted: 18 months ago (2010-07-24 17:22:19 UTC )

There's a natural ebb and flow in most human undertakings. Advance and retrench, write and rewrite, code something and maintain it.

If you create, create, create and never maintain, you get a huge mess. If you write and never rewrite, you never live up to your full potential. Not a big surprise.

Creation is more glamorous than maintenance, of course. None of the programmers in the greatest demand would take a pure maintenance coding job. You think of great writers writing, but few think about how often the revise and rewrite. Taking territory is the stuff war films are made of, but solidifying and fortifying is a footnote on the way to the important stuff.

Less obviously, there's a personal balance between creation and maintenance. Everybody's different, but you've got some personal best level of creation versus maintenance in what you do. You're probably biased a bit in favor of creation from your natural balance since it's considered more glamorous, but there is some actual natural level for you.

When you get out of whack, it's easy to get burned out. "Too much creation" is a bit like happy burnout, or it may just feel like too much work. Too much maintenance, though, probably just feels like you're dragging and uninspired. I know that's how it feels to me.

When in doubt, consider doing a bit of work on your own. I know, more work as a solution to burnout sounds stupid, but the trick is in the kind of work. Put away your vital, important, possibly lucrative maintenance work for a bit, and do a bit of creation on the side, just for the love of it. You can probably use it.