Small Doses

Many large crises consist of small actions that went undone for a long time.

Order is easier to maintain daily than to restore after a month. Scheduled maintenance is cheaper than emergency repair. Regular attention to a relationship is more reliable than a rare grand gesture after a long absence.

Resources are usually better spread over time than delivered in peak loads:

• study a little through the term rather than all night before the exam;
• check the system regularly rather than after a failure;
• keep backups automatically rather than after losing a file;
• discuss small disagreements before they turn into worldviews;
• rest before total exhaustion.

Prevention has a price too. You can prepare so thoroughly for every unlikely misfortune that nothing is left for ordinary life.

So regular action is justified when:

• the problem is likely;
• the damage is significant;
• the check is cheap;
• the build-up happens invisibly;
• fixing it later is far more expensive.

Nobody is obliged to inspect every pipe in the house daily. It is enough to notice leaks, service the system at sensible intervals and know where the water is shut off.

Good maintenance is rarely noticeable. That is its professional tragedy: when everything works, it looks as though it was unnecessary.

Dentistry does this arithmetic openly. A check-up twice a year is cheap and ends with “see you next time.” A couple of missed years turn a filling into a root canal, and a root canal into a crown, and the difference there is not in percentages but in orders of magnitude. And not one day of those two years felt like a decision not to treat your teeth. Each one felt like “no time right now.”

Hence a rule that is hard to follow: regular action is justified not by finding a defect today but by the check being cheap and a late discovery expensive. There is no feedback here other than a bill that never arrived.