"A while back, I got obsessed with the notion of maintenance – or, really, the 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 you try 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 the 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."

The latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “In Praise of Maintenance (Rebroadcast) asks:  Has our culture’s obsession with innovation led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of?

The episode features SUNY Polytechnic Institute Dean of Arts & Sciences Dr. Andrew Russell weighing in.

READ MORE AND LISTEN HERE