When deferred maintenance costs 3x more to fix later…

When This Fires

• During backlog review when deciding which deferred tasks to tackle
• When a maintenance task has been sitting untouched for weeks and context is decaying
• When you estimate that fixing something now would be dramatically easier than fixing it later
• Any prioritization decision where "do it now" competes with "do it later"

Common Failure Mode

Deferring all maintenance because urgent new work always takes priority. This produces an ever-growing maintenance debt with accelerating interest. Eventually, the accumulated recovery costs consume more capacity than the maintenance would have required if done incrementally. The system reaches a state where everything is urgent because everything was deferred.

The Protocol

During weekly review: (1) List all deferred maintenance tasks. (2) For each, estimate: immediate execution cost (if done now) and recovery cost (if deferred another week/month). (3) Calculate the cost multiplication ratio: recovery cost ÷ immediate cost. (4) Any task with ratio ≥ 3x → prioritize above lower-ratio work this week. (5) Tasks with ratio < 2x can continue deferring safely. Tasks at 2-3x are in the warning zone — monitor weekly for ratio increase.