Buildings are less demanding. Or at least they seem that way.

A building can keep functioning while a lot of things aren’t working particularly well. The heat still comes on, even if the system is working harder than it should. A small leak doesn’t necessarily stop anyone from using the room. A door that doesn’t quite close becomes something everyone learns to pull a little harder.

We get used to these things. Until we can’t.

A strange way to protect an investment

I wrote a short note about this in 2010. The question was simple: why do we accept preventive maintenance for a car, which generally loses value, but so often wait for something to break in a building, which we hope will hold or gain value?

That comparison isn’t entirely fair. Plenty of people neglect their cars, and plenty of buildings have good maintenance programs. Buildings don’t always appreciate, either.

But I still think there’s something worth looking at in the difference.

When a car breaks down, the consequence is immediate. You’re on the side of the road. Whatever you were planning to do next isn’t happening.

A building gives you more room to postpone the problem. You can put a bucket under the leak. Use another room. Turn up the thermostat. The cost of waiting may be real, but it doesn’t always arrive as an obvious bill.

Sometimes it arrives as a little more energy used every month. Sometimes as a repair that gets bigger. Sometimes as years of putting up with something that could have worked better.

Knowing what to do is part of the problem

Cars come with a fairly understandable maintenance routine. There are reminders, mileage intervals, and places you can go to have the routine work done.

A building is a collection of different systems, installed at different times, with different service needs. Knowing what needs attention, who should handle it, and whether a recommendation is reasonable can become a project of its own.

Even at home, where the owner and the person paying the bills are often the same person, that can be enough to put things off.

When responsibility is shared, it gets harder. The person who notices the problem may not control the budget. The person approving the work may not experience the inconvenience. Everyone can be doing their particular job while the underlying problem sits there.

What gets our attention?

I don’t think the answer is to maintain everything constantly. Maintenance costs money, and replacing something early isn’t automatically a good decision. Some things can reasonably be left alone until they fail.

The question is whether we’re making that choice deliberately, or just responding to whichever problem becomes impossible to ignore.

A broken system makes a strong case for itself. A functioning system that needs a little attention has a harder time. If we only make room for the first kind, we shouldn’t be surprised when emergencies keep winning.

That feels connected to the idea behind this publication. Systems depend on the signals they receive and what happens in response. A warning light is useful because it makes a problem visible while there’s still a choice about what to do.

Buildings have signals too. They just don’t always come with a light on the dashboard.

The original question still seems reasonable to me: if we consider a building one of our most important investments, why do we so often wait until it breaks to give it our attention?

As I often did, I looked to nature. Nature doesn’t tolerate imbalances for long, and living things tend to be very good at conserving energy and spending it where it counts. My workday felt like the opposite. This time, the idea I landed on came from ants.

I’ve reread that essay many times since. Some of it holds up better than I expected. Some of it makes me wince. That’s how this blog will work: an old idea, an honest look at it with what I know now, and what you might do with it today.

What I wrote then

The core idea came from biology. Ant colonies and termite mounds build complex structures, and no one is in charge. There’s no foreman checking deliveries. Each individual follows a few simple rules, like “if you see another ant digging, start digging,” and the shape of the whole nest emerges from those rules plus feedback.

Then I turned the idea on myself. Here’s what I wrote (spelling lightly fixed):

“If the guiding principles or rules in your life all have positive feedback associated with them, then you are happy as a clam in your pursuit. However, upon evaluation, if you see that there is mostly negative feedback for action, or inaction, life can be a pretty miserable ride… try to see the underlying and relatively simple guiding principles in your life and if there aren’t enough with positive feedback associated with them, well you got some work to do.”

Next, I wrote out a typical day at my job, line by line. Nearly every line looked like this:

• A co-worker asks me for information. Add it to my task list.

• I ask a vendor for information. Wait.

• My boss asks me for something. Add it to my task list.

• A customer asks me for something. Ask a co-worker. Ask a vendor. Send it. Cross it off.

That was the whole day. Four groups of people, and a task list in the middle.

I also described a company that required field technicians to follow a rigid checklist on every customer visit. They couldn’t skip steps or do anything not on the list. Customers didn’t write the list, so when they asked for something else, there was friction. Worse, filling it out crowded out the most valuable thing the technician could collect: what the customer actually wanted.

My proposed fix was a set of simple rules, ant-style. If a customer asks for something we don’t provide, tell your manager. If you’re unhappy, tell your manager. If someone on your team is unhappy, keep asking why until you find the real cause.

And I ended with a line from a friend that stuck with me: “My job isn’t that interesting, it could probably be done by a monkey, but it’s well paid and they have free coffee, so I’ll probably stick around.”

What I got right

Small interactions matter more than the mission statement. What shapes your work isn’t the values on the wall. It’s the dozens of small requests, handoffs, and replies that fill your day. I still believe that’s where most energy is won or lost.

Feedback once a year isn’t feedback. I was skeptical of annual engagement surveys then, and I still am. A survey captures what people say on one day. It doesn’t show how they work.

Rigid processes crowd out judgment. The checklist story is still one of the most common patterns I see. A process built to create control ends up blocking the information that matters most.

Energy follows emotion. I wrote that people aren’t mainly driven by money, they’re driven by emotion, and money is one of the things people feel strongly about. I’d still defend that.

Where I was naive

I thought senior leaders just didn’t know. I wrote that upper managers “have no clue” what happens on the ground. Having led teams myself, I see it differently. Most leaders sense that something is off. The problem is that the signal arrives late and softened, filtered through every layer between them and the work. It isn’t cluelessness. It’s distance.

I thought the fix was “tell your manager.” That rule assumes it’s safe to speak up and that your manager can do something about it. Often neither is true. In a lot of organizations, the loudest signal is the silence of people who stopped raising problems because nothing happened the last time.

I thought a bonus would make good behavior spread. My original rule was that if a customer request got satisfied, the person who raised it got a bonus. Incentives like that tend to get gamed. What actually spreads good behavior is simpler: people see that when they raise something, it gets fixed, and someone notices.

I put all the responsibility on the company. This is the big one. Reading the essay now, the 2010 version of me is waiting for someone above to redesign the system. But the whole point of the ants is that nobody redesigns the system for them. Each one follows its own rules. I had more control over my own rules than I gave myself credit for, and so do most people.

What it means now

That line about the monkey was a joke in 2010. It isn’t anymore. A lot of the work in my old daily list, requesting, receiving, copying, summarizing, crossing off, can now genuinely be done by software. That’s unsettling. It’s also an opening. The parts of work that drain energy without creating value are exactly the parts that are easiest to hand off. What’s left is judgment, relationships, and the problems that need a person. For most of us, that’s the work that gives energy back.

Nature has a simple rule here too: living things that waste energy don’t last. Early in my career I worked on energy efficiency in buildings, and the first lesson was the same. You don’t start by buying better equipment. You start by finding the waste, like the system running full blast in an empty building at 2 AM. People work the same way. Before looking for more energy, find where it’s leaking.

What you can do about it

If you work inside a company:

1. Map your real day, not your job description. Pick one ordinary day and write down every interaction, the way I did in 2010.

2. Mark each line. Does it give you energy, cost you energy, or neither?

3. Find the rules underneath. “If my boss emails, I drop everything.” “If a meeting invite arrives, I accept it.” Those are your if-then rules, and you chose more of them than you think.

4. Change one rule. Not the org chart. One rule. For example: “If a request has no clear owner, I ask who owns it before I start.”

5. Raise problems in a form people can act on. What’s happening, what it costs, and what you’d suggest. That gets through the layers far better than frustration does.

And if you map it honestly and nearly every line drains you, with no room to change it, that’s useful information too. Sometimes the path out really is out.

If you run your own business:

1. Do the same map for yourself, then for one key person on your team.

2. Sort every draining line: eliminate it, automate it, delegate it, or keep it on purpose.

3. Look for your own checklists. The processes you created to feel in control may be blocking your people from noticing what customers want.

4. Pick the thing that annoyed you most this week and ask why five times. The fix is rarely where the annoyance shows up.

Why I’m writing this

This isn’t a blog about hating your job, or quitting to start something. It’s about reaching the goals you already know matter with less wasted time and energy, so you have more left for your work, your family, and the things that make the world a little better.

I’ll keep pulling ideas from that old notebook, being honest about where I was wrong, and trying to turn each one into something you can use on Monday.

Ants don’t have managers. They have simple rules and good feedback. Most of us could use better versions of both.