Mental Purgatory

At work my boss suggested/asked/recommended that I read a book called The Pragmatic Programmer. While the book is great and deals with a lot of interesting lessons in computer programming, I decided to write about it here for its applicability in your every day life.

One of the concepts that struck me most was this idea of the broken window. The book said that the thing that serves as the catalyst for building degradation is a window breaking and not being fixed. After a window breaks and doesn’t get fixed, the entire buildings would slowly fall apart with property damage and graffiti and the whole nine yards. In one experiment, an abandoned car was left outside an apartment building for a week and nothing happened to it. However, after a window broke in the building, the car was picked apart within days.

Why?

The reason behind this concept is this idea of accepting disrepair, or of allowing things to fall apart. Looking beyond programming, I started seeing the broken window in every aspect of my life. Here’s an example:

First, my new apartment. When I first moved in, I was meticulous about cleaning everything and making sure I kept everything in tip top shape. However, I didn’t feel like washing my dishes Monday morning before work, and when I got home, just added my dinner dishes to the pile, feeling too tired to clean them out. With this acknowledgment of my willingness to let the place go, I began leaving my clothes lying about when I went to bed and began to become slower about cleaning the cat’s litter. I wasn’t consciously deciding to let the place go, I had simply created an opening which I recognized in the back of my mind and followed through with.

The moral of the story is, be wary of the broken window. If you start to notice yourself letting something go, take action to fix it, before it spreads throughout every aspect of your life.