Even people who run a kitchen everyday underrate waking up to a clean one and often leave the dirty dishes in the sink and leave the counters unclean. This clutter over the course of the days will bring two major issues. It will lead to tiring because of cleaning up first on waking up even before a coffee and the other which causes the fatigue in the long run due to the cycle of clutter and improper cleaning. When you enter the kitchen, you should be able to make your breakfast or coffee just right away instead of cleaning the kitchen and washing the dirty dishes. I also some time ago, wrote about parallels in running a kitchen and programming.

What if the cook wants to keep the kitchen clean but work piles up so much that they have to leave a wave of mess behind to achieve the dishes of that day. It happens once in a while during feasts and festivals, which is often followed by cleaning up the mess and cooking a little light next day. As a routine, it is always best to clean up the counters, rearrange the utensils and clear up the dirty sink before going to bed every night. Waking up to a clean kitchen is something that has a cascading effect on the peace of mind because a day always starts good. So one cannot plan feast after feast without resetting the state of the kitchen.

This is what you will hear from Software developers, they are never allowed to prioritise to keep their code clean, they are made to pile on tech and architectural debt to prepare for release after release. Developers end up starting on a back foot and will be inclined to add more mess to the existing pile. I like the idea of how Basecamp has a cycle of big and small batches, this gives enough leeway to the tech team to prioritise between features, bugs and debts and keep a healthy momentum going.

Waking up to a clean code is also an underrated feeling, but it will leave a great positive impact on the team that lives in the code.