I’m married and have three kids in the elementary and middle school age ranges. They’re doing things that normal kids do: growing, learning, being active, participating in sports and other activities. My wife and I both work. Our baseline level of “busy” is relatively high, as it is for any family with three kids at home.

Like most families, we experienced some changes starting around March 2020. Some of those changes reduced our level of “busy”—like activities and gatherings being canceled. But other changes increased our level of “busy”—like long quests to find rare and valuable items such as toilet paper. Still other changes shifted where the “busy” was applied—like virtual school for the kids and adapting to virtual teaching for my wife.

Somewhere in all of that, we had an unrelated medical issue come up. It mildly increased our level of “busy” for a while, but we did what we had to do and kept on with life.

A few months into the pandemic, Cedar Rapids (and much of Iowa) experienced a derecho. Much of the city, including my house, experienced sustained 100+ mph wind. We had substantial roof damage and substantial interior damage from water that got in through the roof and (closed, locked) windows. It was an amazing, terrifying storm. Neighbors had tree losses. Power was out for a week. So we did what we could. We helped neighbors clear trees. We thanked friends that did our laundry, provided a generator, and helped us move things out of bedrooms. We filed an insurance claim. We found contractors to fix things up.

With insurance difficulties, supply shortages, and busy contractors, repairs took a long time. That’s calendar time, sure, but also time spent coordinating.

We moved nearly everything in our house at least once during the process, if not more. First-world problems, to be sure, having so many things and so much space.

Meanwhile, the 2020-2021 school year started with all of its COVID precautions and stress and finally ended with most of the precautions lifted or ignored, with all the stress of stress of adaptation smeared through the entire school year. Summer came.

And in the summer my employer was acquired and eliminated my department, and I found another job, feeling fortunate to have landed on my feet.

And as I transitioned jobs, we finally finished the last of the interior work on the house.

And as the school year started, my wife headed back to the classroom with an increased workload because of the difficulty hiring teachers after a full school year of COVID. (There’s a whole separate case study there about how workload is shed onto those still present, and a whole slew of musing that can be (and already has been) done about how important schools are to our society and how that became obvious during the pandemic and how unrecognized and unthanked teachers are in all of this.)

During all of this, life hadn’t stopped. I’m happy about that! The kids kept growing, learning, spending time with friends, being involved in sports and other activities. We stayed involved in our community. As best we could, we kept connected with friends and family. Fall turned to winter.

Not all that long ago, winter, with all its snowpants and boots and coats and hats and gloves and snow shovels, finally gave up. As we started on the normal process of checking sizes and packing things away for the summer, we realized there was just too much. Not in the affluent Western “we have so much and there are those in the world that have barely anything” way. In the “wait, why are there so many pairs of boots and shoes here, and what’s in this box, and why do we still have these toddler-sized mittens?” way.

What happened, in short, is that our level of “busy” crept up (and occasionally spiked) so we didn’t have the time to do some of the normal maintenance we do: discarding things that are worn out, doing “spring cleaning”, having a garage sale every now and then, or just donating stuff that’s too small. We were—are—two or three years behind on basic life-and-stuff-maintenance.

Being that far behind cascades in interesting ways. We’re not just a normal “maintenance pass” away from being caught up. Normal maintenance is incremental, gradual, and part of the normal rhythm of life. We need something a bit bigger than that.

But even if a normal maintenance was enough, we’re not quite able to do normal maintenance right now. Some of the resources we need are gone. We have a storage area in our basement. We keep Christmas decorations, Thanksgiving decorations, Halloween buckets, a supply of plastic Easter eggs (for reasons that always seem good at the time), tools, rarely-used sports equipment, and other typical storage area stuff. It’s great workspace for sorting, or temporary storage space for donation boxes—under normal circumstances. Right now, it’s hugely overstuffed and disorganized. Things that should have been garage-saled in 2020 are piled up. So are hastily-packed boxes that came out of bedrooms after the derecho that we still need to sort. Things have been pulled out by people besides me that lack the reach or strength or inclination to put them back, and other things have been piled on those things. It is simply unusable as workspace or storage space right now.

Besides lacking resources to do some things, even what can be done now takes longer. Finding the bin for snowpants isn’t as simple as walking up to the shelf and pulling it down. It’s finding a pile that looks like it might have the right bin, disassembling the pile, opening the candidate bin, sighing, reassembling the pile, and repeating until found. Getting to my circular saw involves weaving through piles and squeezing past a few pieces of furniture.

Simple maintenance won’t cut it anymore. We need a project to get back to a good state. Actually, we need several. The storage area, sure. Also, the kitchen (the kids are big enough that we don’t need a cupboard for their sippy cups and toddler spoons anymore). The family room in the basement that has some bins stored in it. And other places around the house need attention for similar reasons.

We started in the garage, and got a quick and delightful win. Then we moved into the laundry room that does double-duty as our the entry room off the garage. That’s where the true depth of this problem hit me. Remember earlier when I referred back to snowpants and boots and shoes? We filled a contractor garbage bag with snowpants, boots, and shoes that are some combination of worn out, too small, and too damaged to be donated. We had a bunch of other junk we cleaned out of there too. And that’s in a room that’s a shade less than 9’x6′ and mostly occupied by a washing machine and dryer.

It’s no wonder I felt stressed every time I was in there, and no wonder I felt like it just wouldn’t stay clean. It was way beyond what normal maintenance, light sorting, and tidying could handle.

So what’s the point?

First of all, the point is not “oh, poor Matt and his family.” Yeah, stuff happened and things have been rough but we have amazing friends and everything is getting back to good.

The point is also not “stuff is bad” or “too much stuff is bad”. Stuff certainly can be a problem, but in this story, “stuff” and “things” are just a nice visible manifestation of something that happens all the time in other situations, but less visibly. So in this case, “stuff” is helpful in making the point.

So here’s the point.

A few years ago, my family was, like most families with multiple kids, operating close to capacity. Our baseline level of “busy” was high, and we certainly couldn’t have doubled our “busy” in any reasonable way. Operating at that state, we were keeping up okay with normal changes in our environment, like kids getting older and seasons changing. But then we had major disruptions: a pandemic, a weather disaster, trying to recover, and a job change. We naturally stopped doing “little things” to handle the new “big things” we had to deal with. Some of our normal life maintenance fit into the “little things” bucket that got dropped. Recently, we noticed that some of our systems had failed completely—and we hadn’t even realized they had failed years ago!

I’m going to take a second here to reframe this all in the world of work.

Companies almost always have systems and processes. That’s how stuff gets done. Maintenance systems are built around that. The software guys write the software and the TPS reports ensure that the software meets the requirements.

Usually, those systems and processes, including maintenance, respond to changes in the business environment. We realize we need cover sheets on the TPS reports. Bob gets promoted out of the department so Peter needs to take over stapler compliance checks. We double our headcount (yay growth!) or have a layoff (boo economy!). We adapt.

But sometimes, disruptions happen and we need to handle them. There’s an acquisition, or a key employee leaves, or a fire, or an important integration needs to be built quick to land a partnership. Sometimes multiple levels of disruption happen at the same time. The acquisition is delayed a bit and both Ross and Rachel go out on parental leave, and we need to move up the priority of that big project because our competitor just made an announcement.

In the moment, we feel some stress, but we know we’ll get through it. And when we do, it’ll all be okay because things will be back to normal and all our normal maintenance systems will clean up the loose ends.

And sometimes it’s true.

And sometimes it’s not.

Sometimes, the environment changes so much that our maintenance systems completely fail without anyone even noticing. Or, to put it more precisely, our maintenance systems continue to operate but no longer have the capacity to handle the necessary work; or they continue to operate but have not been adapted to the new reality and so give us a false sense of security. Or, to re-state it in terms of its effect, our maintenance systems completely fail without anyone noticing.

So there we are, with failed maintenance systems and only a vague awareness that badness is somehow piling up but nobody else quite seems to be worried, or at least nobody outside of the department is worried, or at least not worried enough to do anything about it, and anyway there’s work to be done so I should really go get some real work done instead of worrying I guess.

And that puts us in the situation where it doesn’t even take a crisis to break things. It just takes an unexpected-but-normally-okay increase in workload, or one more little change in the process, and everything grinds to a halt. The failures finally have cascaded to the point of breaking something noticeable, and often big.

So how do we stay out of that situation?

Well, I don’t think you should ask me. I ended up in this situation, remember? But since you’re still reading this, I’ll share a couple of ideas.

Start by paying attention to your feelings. Does it feel clunky or convoluted or like it’s just not working? I had that feeling when I looked at the piles of shoes on the laundry room floor next to the unused shoe baskets. Trust yourself.

If you feel like something’s not working, pay attention to the little details. What’s difficult about this thing that you’re feeling isn’t quite right? That difficulty might be a clue about what’s changed. One thing that changed in my laundry room was that there were more shoes. That could have clued me in that we hadn’t purged outgrown shoes in a while. Realizing that could have gotten me to the point of realizing that we had other maintenance tasks we hadn’t done in a while.

Be willing to start a project to fix it. There are probably two parts to the project. Most obvious is getting through the backlog (of shoes, or Trello cards, or Jira tickets, or paperwork…). Less obvious is adapting the maintenance process to the current environment. As a really simple example, my kids’ feet are bigger, so the shoe baskets we had weren’t working anymore. We needed a different way of organizing everyone’s shoes; just sticking with the old baskets would have at best re-started the clock on the problem.

Whether it’s a feeling of discontent every time you step into your laundry room, or feeling like your software deployment process just isn’t quite as good as it should be, or that nagging uncertainty about how much longer it takes to get those reports from accounting lately, or just a suspicion that your level of “busy” has been too high for too long—pay attention to it. It’s a signal that maybe, just maybe, a system that was close to capacity has been overwhelmed and failed. Your vague feeling may be the closest you’ll get to a warning before it cascades to something bigger.