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Why Maintenance Matters Now - Construal Level Theory, Marshmallows, and Hyperbolic Discounting

Summary

The episode begins by introducing the classic marshmallow test as an illustration of hyperbolic discounting—the human tendency to value immediate rewards more highly than future ones. The host connects this to everyday maintenance tasks we neglect, like changing guitar strings, cleaning closets, or clearing digital clutter. These tasks offer delayed or invisible benefits, making them easy to postpone in favor of more immediately gratifying activities.

The discussion deepens with the introduction of the “maintenance paradox”: when maintenance is performed consistently and correctly, its benefits become invisible. We only notice maintenance when it fails, creating a perverse incentive to delay until problems become urgent. The host shares personal examples, like allowing his closet to become messy to get a dopamine rush from cleaning it later, illustrating how we can train ourselves into bad maintenance cycles.

A key framework introduced is Construal Level Theory, which explains how psychological distance—temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical—makes maintenance difficult. Temporal distance relates to hyperbolic discounting. Spatial distance explains why attics or basements fall into disrepair. Social distance affects work on code others will maintain. Most profoundly, hypothetical distance refers to preventing negative outcomes we never experience, making the value of preventive maintenance hard to appreciate.

The host argues that traditional prioritization frameworks, like the Eisenhower Matrix, often fail for maintenance because these tasks are “important but not urgent” until they become crises. The solution is not better prioritization but habit formation. Making maintenance a standard practice, like making your bed daily or applying sunscreen, changes the quality of other experiences. It creates a calm environment and a sense of control that enhances everything else.

The episode concludes by encouraging listeners to adopt a maintenance mindset. The host acknowledges that finding the right balance is a personal exercise but emphasizes that maintenance is unlikely to happen through singular acts of will or basic prioritization. It must become a habitual part of how one operates to overcome the inherent psychological friction against these valuable but undervalued actions.

Recommendations

Concepts

  • Hyperbolic Discounting — The psychological tendency to choose smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones. The episode uses the marshmallow test as the primary example and explains how this bias leads us to deprioritize maintenance.
  • Construal Level Theory — A psychological theory by Trope and Liberman that explains how temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical distance affect our thinking and decision-making. The host applies it to explain why maintenance feels disconnected and less valuable.
  • Eisenhower Matrix — A prioritization framework that categorizes tasks by urgency and importance. The host mentions that maintenance tasks typically fall into the ‘Important but Not Urgent’ quadrant, which is why they are often neglected.

People

  • Yakov Trope and Nira Liberman — The psychologists who developed Construal Level Theory. The host references their paper on the theory of psychological distance as a key framework for understanding the challenges of maintenance.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to the marshmallow test and hyperbolic discounting — The episode opens with the classic marshmallow experiment, where children must choose between one treat now or two later. This illustrates hyperbolic discounting—the psychological tendency to devalue future rewards compared to immediate ones. The host connects this to a fundamental challenge in human behavior and decision-making.
  • 00:02:20 — Personal example: Neglecting guitar string maintenance — The host uses the personal example of postponing changing his guitar strings. He describes how the degradation is slow and progressive, making it easy to ignore. The immediate effort feels like a low priority compared to the intangible future benefit of better sound quality, a direct example of hyperbolic discounting in action.
  • 00:04:57 — Defining the category: Items of disrepair and tech debt — The discussion broadens to various forms of ‘disrepair’ in our lives: unmade beds, cluttered desks, outdated development environments, unused phone shortcuts, and unread emails. These are all analogous to ‘tech debt’ in software—tasks that are beneficial in the long run but offer no immediate payoff, causing them to be perpetually deprioritized.
  • 00:07:44 — The maintenance paradox: Invisible benefits — The host introduces the ‘maintenance paradox.’ When maintenance is done well and on time—like changing an air filter or guitar strings regularly—its benefits are invisible. We only notice maintenance when it fails. This creates a reverse incentive; we are ‘trained’ to wait until we can feel the improvement from fixing a noticeable problem, rather than consistently preventing it.
  • 00:11:04 — Introducing Construal Level Theory and psychological distance — The host introduces Construal Level Theory by Trope and Liberman, which identifies four types of psychological distance that make future actions feel less relevant: temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical. Each type applies to maintenance, making it feel disconnected from our present selves and thus easier to postpone.
  • 00:14:54 — The challenge of hypothetical distance in maintenance — Hypothetical distance is highlighted as particularly profound for maintenance. Preventive actions stop us from experiencing a negative outcome, so we never feel their true value. It’s hard to appreciate the work that prevents a sunburn, a broken guitar string, or a system failure because we never endure the alternative.
  • 00:17:03 — The solution: Making maintenance habitual — The host argues that overcoming the friction against maintenance requires making it a standard practice or habit, not just a prioritized task. He returns to the example of making his bed on his son’s birthday, explaining that this habitual act creates a sense of control and a serene environment that improves the quality of the entire day.
  • 00:20:03 — Maintenance and the Eisenhower Matrix — The host places maintenance tasks within the Eisenhower Matrix, identifying them as classic ‘Important but Not Urgent’ items. They remain non-urgent until they become a crisis—like a guitar string breaking on stage. This categorization explains why they are consistently pushed down our to-do lists despite their long-term importance.
  • 00:21:02 — Conclusion: Adopting a maintenance mindset — The episode concludes by encouraging listeners to adopt a ‘maintenance mindset.’ The host states that maintenance is unlikely to happen through basic prioritization alone. It requires conscious habit formation to integrate these valuable behaviors into daily life, using personal wisdom to find the right balance.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2025-06-13T07:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:22:57

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] many listeners of developer t have probably heard of the marshmallow test

[00:00:16] the basic idea of the marshmallow test is to have a uh in in the test at least have a child sit down

[00:00:27] although i think i would probably struggle with this as an adult and set in front of them

[00:00:33] something that would give them immediate gratification marshmallows are a pretty good

[00:00:40] example of this you could do with a cookie or really anything with sugar and let them know that

[00:00:48] they can either have the marshmallow the single marshmallow now or they can wait for you to return

[00:00:57] and double their marshmallow treat now the interesting thing is that the return never

[00:01:06] happens the behavior of the children is documented and many of them fail they fail to wait

[00:01:16] many of them not only fail but choose to eat the marshmallow immediately

[00:01:21] and so the outcome from this

[00:01:27] and many other experiments after the marshmallow test all worked to reinforce the same basic

[00:01:34] premise people discount future gains this idea is called hyperbolic discounting and it’s been

[00:01:46] studied many times over a dollar now is generally speaking more interesting than a dollar tomorrow

[00:01:55] but

[00:01:57] more insightfully a dollar now may be depending on your particular shape of discounting curve

[00:02:05] a dollar now may be more interesting to you than two dollars tomorrow but i want to take this

[00:02:12] concept and fill it out a little bit more and talk about how it might apply in our daily lives

[00:02:20] tonight when i finish recording this episode i have a plan to change the strings on my guitar

[00:02:27] actually i have a couple of guitars and they all are in need of new strings

[00:02:34] if you don’t know guitars over time the strings become a little bit less lively they’re less

[00:02:41] enjoyable to play they’re more likely to break but it happens progressively it happens slowly over

[00:02:49] time and so it’s very easy to when that kind of degradation begins

[00:02:56] ignore it

[00:02:57] to put it off there’s other more important things than changing my guitar strings it seems

[00:03:05] in the moment like a low priority item and i can justify it by saying well

[00:03:11] the strings that i have still have some life left in them i’m going to keep playing the ones that i

[00:03:17] have but the truth is that every time i play on a degraded string i’m getting less of an experience

[00:03:25] out of playing my guitar

[00:03:27] of course there’s probably some optimal degradation point at which now i should change the strings

[00:03:36] but almost every time i tend not to i tend to let it go until it is far beyond that point

[00:03:49] why is that well in another area uh you might find yourself

[00:03:57] not making your bed every day you may find yourself allowing trash to pile up on your desk

[00:04:03] or perhaps you are cleaner than the average person but you haven’t taken care of your

[00:04:13] development environment maybe you have old crufty code laying around maybe you’re like me

[00:04:21] and you have shortcuts that keep on running on your iphone that don’t do anything useful

[00:04:27] in your life and you have a lot of себя that is so irrelevant to you and so it’s a good way to

[00:04:27] apart from I don’t know if that’s a good question or if it’s a good answer or maybe it makes you

[00:04:27] more. You have a pile of reminders that you haven’t cleared out of the backlog of your phone

[00:04:35] or pretty much everyone I know falls in this category. You have thousands of emails that

[00:04:42] probably you’ll never read and are not really useful to you but keep on nagging you with that

[00:04:48] red notification icon on your phone. All of these things fall into a similar category.

[00:04:57] These are items of disrepair. In our work we see this and we often label it tech debt but there’s

[00:05:08] also other types of work that might fall into this category. Things like automation, things like

[00:05:16] improving your IDE, setting your personal development environment up, setting up those

[00:05:23] key bindings, actually taking the time to do that.

[00:05:27] To do the key bindings the way you like them. These are all things that we put at the very

[00:05:33] bottom of our list. Why? Because we have much more important things to do. Tomorrow is my son’s

[00:05:40] eighth birthday and in the morning I’ve already told myself tonight that I’m going to make my bed.

[00:05:49] Why is that? Why would I take the time on my son’s eighth birthday instead of spending the time with

[00:05:57] him? Why would I take the time to make my bed? Someone could easily say that that can’t be the

[00:06:05] most important way to spend your time and therefore you should deprioritize that. Put

[00:06:10] it at the bottom of the list. There may be days where that’s the case but in this episode I hope

[00:06:18] to convince you that these tasks are indeed important. Not only because of the

[00:06:27] internal sense of pride that you might get for sticking to a particular commitment that you made,

[00:06:33] although that has its own value, but also because it changes the quality of the other things you do.

[00:06:43] Adding one more to the list, hopefully this will provide a little bit of extra insight,

[00:06:48] changing your air filter. The reason why I decided to add this one at the end

[00:06:53] is to discuss this modifier quality.

[00:06:57] If you changed your air filter now, when will you benefit? The intuitive answer is probably

[00:07:07] right now. Of course I’ll benefit now because my air quality will improve. The truth is that

[00:07:15] you’re going to benefit now and as long as the air filter lasts. And if you change the air filter

[00:07:25] again, this is the intuitive answer. If you change the air filter now, when will you benefit?

[00:07:27] The interesting part, there may be no change in the benefit. This is why maintenance often

[00:07:35] goes unnoticed. Maintenance paradox. When maintenance is being run properly,

[00:07:44] when you are changing your filters when you’re supposed to, no one will notice the difference.

[00:07:52] You won’t notice the difference.

[00:07:57] If I were to change my guitar strings every three weeks, let’s say, that’s a pretty aggressive

[00:08:03] strategy. I may never notice any degradation on the strings at all. And so the maintenance itself,

[00:08:12] let’s say it was performed by somebody else entirely without any of my knowledge,

[00:08:17] I may never know that they’re doing it. It becomes invisible. And so we don’t get the same kind of

[00:08:27] gratification out of consistent maintenance. This is kind of a reverse training or reverse

[00:08:34] incentive if you want to think about it that way. Because if we do wait until we can notice,

[00:08:41] there is some kind of benefit to that action. We get a training, a sense of training

[00:08:49] that waiting and then performing the maintenance gives us a positive improvement. We

[00:08:57] feel the change. So these factors, the fact that we have this tendency to discount whatever is

[00:09:07] not going to give us immediate gratification, we tend to devalue that relative to other options

[00:09:14] that will give us immediate gratification. That’s going to provide friction to maintenance.

[00:09:20] Additionally, in order to get into a good habit of maintenance,

[00:09:25] you have to

[00:09:27] kind of deregulate yourself a little bit from the dopamine rush that happens if you don’t

[00:09:34] keep up with your maintenance. A good example of this is somebody who lets their closet get out

[00:09:40] of control. I might know someone who does this on a cycle. It’s not my wife, it’s me. I tend to

[00:09:49] allow my closet to pile up. It’s a bad habit that I have that I’d like to change. The trouble is

[00:09:55] that very often,

[00:09:57] I end up training myself with a rush of dopamine. Once I’ve allowed my closet

[00:10:03] to pile up, once I’ve thrown my shoes on the ground instead of putting them on the shelf

[00:10:09] enough times, there is a sense of relief that comes whenever I finally do get around to cleaning

[00:10:18] it. And so I have this bad cycle. This is training me that it’s okay, that it’s okay, that it’s okay, that it’s okay.

[00:10:27] It’s okay to let stuff sit on the floor because the marginal benefit, the marginal benefit of

[00:10:33] cleaning it now, of picking my shoes up immediately, doesn’t provide me enough of an

[00:10:39] immediate gratification. And if I do allow it to pile up, eventually I do get that larger reward.

[00:10:48] So it’s kind of a catch-22, this maintenance paradox. But there’s yet another force that

[00:10:56] makes maintenance.

[00:10:57] Difficult. And this is a little bit of a newer theory in psychology. It’s called the

[00:11:04] construal level theory. And it comes from a paper, and I’m going to attempt to say these

[00:11:10] names. I may say them incorrectly. Please forgive me if I do. Yakov Trope and Mira Lieberman,

[00:11:19] or Lieberman, wrote a paper about construal level theory of psychological distance.

[00:11:27] And the basic idea presented in this paper is that we construe the connection of our actions,

[00:11:37] for example. We have a cognitive construal. Construal kind of means that we’re distancing

[00:11:46] ourselves. There’s different kinds of distances that they talk about. Specifically, they talk

[00:11:51] about temporal distance, that is, distance in time. They talk about

[00:11:57] spatial distance, that is, literal physical space. They talk about social distance, that is,

[00:12:04] the things that I do don’t affect me, but rather they might affect someone else, or this action

[00:12:11] may affect someone in a social group. And then finally, hypothetical distance. And each of these

[00:12:20] applies to this concept of maintenance. We’ve already talked about the idea of temporal discounting,

[00:12:27] which is a direct example of temporal distancing. That is that because we have this temporal

[00:12:36] discounting, that is, the value happens sometime in the future. The value of this action is

[00:12:46] disconnected from me, or it is less valuable than something, less immediate value than some

[00:12:54] other action. If I were to do maintenance, I would have to do maintenance. I would have to do

[00:12:56] maintenance. I would have to do maintenance. I would have to do maintenance. I would have to do

[00:12:57] maintenance. Then I’m not going to have the same immediate value as some other action I might

[00:13:02] take, right? The temporal distance here, it creates that, or it’s created by that discounting,

[00:13:13] right? So we’re creating a little bit of distance between ourselves and the value that we feel from

[00:13:21] the action that we’re taking. Similarly, you know, spatial distance is a little bit of a

[00:13:27] hard one to talk about with maintenance, but we’ve all experienced this feeling. For example,

[00:13:36] it’s likely that areas that are further away in your house, for example, an attic or a basement,

[00:13:43] are going to be in more disrepair than areas that are closer to you. And that’s not

[00:13:50] any difference necessarily in terms of ownership or who’s responsible for those

[00:13:57] spaces. It’s just that it is much closer physically to you. The concept of social

[00:14:04] distance, and I’m not talking about social distancing as we learned during the COVID era,

[00:14:12] but social distance in this case would mean that the actions that we’re taking, let’s say,

[00:14:19] for example, a maintenance action in a code base that we’re responsible for,

[00:14:25] but that we are not necessarily going to keep being responsible for, right? And perhaps,

[00:14:32] you know, the effect that our code has on another team, there’s going to be some distance there

[00:14:40] because we’re not impacted directly or as directly as someone else is. And then finally, and perhaps

[00:14:47] most interestingly for maintenance is the hypothetical distance. This one is especially

[00:14:54] profound.

[00:14:55] Because this goes directly to the idea of preventing or a statistical effect. If I were

[00:15:05] to change the strings on my guitar, then I am preventing the experience of playing

[00:15:14] on dead strings. This is what gives that feeling of distance, right? It gives that

[00:15:25] maintenance paradox. It creates that maintenance paradox that we never actually feel the distance

[00:15:32] because it’s the hypothetical distance. It is the hypothetical distance that we are preventing.

[00:15:40] It’s hard to know exactly how valuable a given bit of work will be because we never actually

[00:15:49] experienced the downside. The prevention kept us from experiencing the downside.

[00:15:55] So we can measure, potentially, we could measure what our hypothetical losses would have been

[00:16:04] had we not put that measure in place. But very often, the effort to measure hypothetical losses

[00:16:11] is not undertaken. Instead, we measure our real losses that are happening in another area.

[00:16:19] And so maintenance ends up being deprioritized while reactive losses,

[00:16:25] as we’re getting more faster.

[00:16:26] So, let’s be a little more objective and let’s think about it this way.

[00:16:27] Theounce motion is more important than the normal rotation of our Так playing

[00:16:31] the volume gradually.

[00:16:33] Because it creates more

[00:16:49] rove losses than we just Vou.

[00:16:51] We do.

[00:16:53] And then again,

[00:16:54] I’m going to go into that a little bit more in there with you.

[00:16:55] less important to us. So all of these are friction to maintenance. What do we do about this? What do

[00:17:03] we do about all of these effects? Maintenance becomes a part of how you behave. Let me say

[00:17:12] this again. Maintenance becomes a standard practice, a standard operating practice in how

[00:17:19] you behave. So another way to think about this is it becomes habitual. It becomes habitual. Why am I

[00:17:28] making my bed in the morning tomorrow? Why am I making my bed in the morning tomorrow on my son’s

[00:17:36] eighth birthday instead of immediately going to spend time with him? I’m going to get up and make

[00:17:40] my bed. It’s because I will experience the important parts of my day differently.

[00:17:49] And it’s not just about the bed. It’s about creating an environment for me that is

[00:17:58] calm and serene. Making my bed allows me to feel a sense of control. And there’s a lot of

[00:18:06] other ways that you may apply this. And psychologically speaking, not all maintenance

[00:18:11] is going to have the same psychological effect, right? So this is, for me personally,

[00:18:16] it will enhance

[00:18:19] the time that I do spend with my son. The quality of that time will be improved in the same way

[00:18:27] that if tomorrow afternoon during his birthday party, we’re going to go swim in a swimming pool,

[00:18:34] I’m going to stop and put on sunscreen. This is a maintenance, a preventive measure. It’s going to

[00:18:41] prevent future pain for me. I’ve had sunburns plenty of times in my life. I don’t want to

[00:18:46] experience one tomorrow. And so,

[00:18:49] instead of immediately jumping in and having fun, instead of, you know, getting right in the pool

[00:18:57] and later having to pay for, you know, how fast I wanted to get into the pool,

[00:19:04] I’m going to take the time and perform that basic maintenance as a matter of habit

[00:19:10] in order to deal with that hypothetical value, the hypothetical distance.

[00:19:19] Between the ideal experience, right? I’m going to prevent a burn. So the whole framework here,

[00:19:29] the idea is to help you understand that maintenance is unlikely to happen through

[00:19:37] our typical prioritization structures. It’s very hard to convince ourselves because of all of these

[00:19:44] different biases and things like the control level theory, the control level theory, the control level

[00:19:49] theory, the fact that we have this temporal discounting, you know, this hyperbolic temporal

[00:19:55] discounting. All of these things are friction to us performing these maintenance type duties.

[00:20:03] The kind of work that feels marginal. It feels low value in the moment. Very likely, if you were

[00:20:13] to pull out your Eisenhower matrix, and if you listen to the show, you know exactly what I’m

[00:20:17] talking about. If you are a new listener, if you’re a new listener, if you’re a new listener,

[00:20:19] go Google Eisenhower matrix. You’ve probably heard of it. This would fit squarely in the

[00:20:26] important but not urgent category. These kinds of tasks are important, but they are usually not

[00:20:35] urgent until they become urgent, until your strings break on stage, until your room is so messy,

[00:20:45] or until your bed has not been made for so long.

[00:20:49] You can’t find the sheet. The disrepair begins to become overwhelming. I encourage you to adopt

[00:21:02] a maintenance mindset. Adopt maintenance habits. It’s an exercise I’ll leave up to you to determine

[00:21:12] to what degree. That is the balance that you have to use your own frameworks and

[00:21:19] wisdom and insight to determine. But it is unlikely to happen through a singular frame.

[00:21:27] You are unlikely to participate in these behaviors through basic prioritization structures.

[00:21:35] Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea. I appreciate you making time

[00:21:40] for this podcast today. This is unlikely to be the very most important thing that you’ll do today,

[00:21:47] but I hope that this podcast will help you. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at

[00:21:49] This can act as somewhat of a maintenance behavior in your career and in your professional life and

[00:21:56] beyond. I very much appreciate the audience who listens to this show, the people, the engineers

[00:22:03] and software developers, the designers, everyone who listens to this show. You make it worthwhile

[00:22:09] to make this podcast each and every week. So thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed

[00:22:16] this episode, two things I’m going to ask you to do.

[00:22:19] One, go and leave a review in iTunes, whatever podcasting provider you use probably has reviews.

[00:22:25] iTunes is the most impactful to the show’s longevity, our ability to keep going as a

[00:22:33] podcast. And then second, subscribe in whatever podcasting app you’re currently using. The last

[00:22:38] thing I will do is invite you to join the Developer Tea Discord community. Come and check it out at

[00:22:43] developertea.com. That is free and it will always be free. Thanks so much for listening. And until

[00:22:48] next time, enjoy.

[00:22:49] Enjoy your tea.

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