There is a question I ask myself more and more often. How much does indifference cost? Not anger, not a mistake, not even laziness, but indifference. The quiet "let it be", "we'll finish it later", "someone will figure it out".
My own sins and unfinished work. And the sins and unfinished work of those who came before me. Because every time I set out to create something, sooner or later I run into someone's "we'll finish it later". And someday someone will run into mine.
And today in Ukraine the war adds to this bill. When a Russian missile or drone hits a substation, a boiler house, a water main or an archive, we find out how well we actually knew what we are restoring. And where we did not finish the documentation before the war, restoration is slower, costlier and riskier.
Where it starts: with me
Indifference never starts with the state or with humanity. It starts with one person. With me.
- My own education. A topic I once "skipped" because it was boring or hard. Years later it is exactly what I lack, and I pay for it twice: in time, in nerves, and sometimes in other people's money.
- Things not finished to the end. A course dropped halfway. A book read to the middle. A project that is 90% done, where the last 10% never reached the state of "usable without me".
- Mess at home. A tool that is "somewhere". Documents that "were definitely here". Each search takes a few minutes. A few minutes a day add up to days a year.
There is an old parable I love for its directness. The parable of the talents. One servant did not lose or waste his talent, he simply hid it: "And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine" (Matthew 25:25, KJV). And the master's answer: "Thou wicked and slothful servant" (Matthew 25:26, KJV). Not a criminal. Just indifferent to what he had been entrusted with.
Next: the group, the office, the team
What is my personal problem at home becomes a shared one at the office.
- Mess in the office. A folder called "New" holding everything from the last five years. A cabinet of documents where nobody knows what is current.
- Mess in software. Code without comments, without tests, without a description of how to deploy it. Integrations only one person knows about. A password stored "on his phone".
- Office engineering networks without documentation. Which socket is on which breaker. Where this cable goes. Where the pipe runs that you must not drill into when hanging a shelf. A diagram that does not exist, or exists but is ten years old.
Programmers have long had a precise name for this: technical debt. Ward Cunningham wrote in 1992: "Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite... The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt." I wrote about this in my article on cleansing.
This debt can be measured. In Stripe's study The Developer Coefficient (2018, surveyed by Harris Poll), developers estimated they spend on average 17.3 hours a week on maintenance: 13.5 hours on technical debt and 3.8 hours on "bad code", out of an average 41.1-hour work week. That is about 42% of the time spent on the past rather than on the new. To be fair: these are respondents' own estimates, not measurements.
And in offices that don't write code? Same thing, it is just called "searching for information". The McKinsey Global Institute in The social economy (2012) estimated that an interaction worker spends nearly 20% of the workweek looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help. An important caveat: this estimate is based on IDC data, and the popular "1.8 hours a day" figure, according to a check of the full report, does not appear in it. So I use only what the original source says.
Almost one day a week. Almost every fifth working day goes to finding something someone once did not write down or put back in its place.
At home, underground
Now the engineering networks at home. Which of you knows exactly where the cable runs inside your wall? Where the water pipe goes under the yard? Which of you received a wiring diagram from the previous owner?
I almost never meet a person who can answer "yes" to all three. And then we drill. And dig.
City, community, region, country
Here indifference stops being private and becomes systemic. A low engineering level and poor-quality engineering documentation of a city, a hromada (community), an oblast (region), a country are not an abstraction. It is an excavator cutting a cable because the cable is not on the map. It is a repair crew searching for a valve for hours. It is a designer spending weeks collecting input data because there is no single data layer of networks.
I wrote about this in detail in "Blind grids" and the economics of recovery. Networks whose exact location and condition we do not know are blind. And everyone who works with them works blind.
The scale can be seen in countries that count it:
- The Common Ground Alliance in its 2024 DIRT Report recorded 196,977 unique reported damages to underground utilities in the US and Canada. In a single year. And only those reported voluntarily.
- In its economic impact study (2026), the CGA estimates the full cost of such damages in the US at $83.2 billion a year. Direct repair is the smallest part of it; most is disrupted business, delayed projects, and impact on communities. It is a modeled estimate, not a sum of invoices, and should be read as such.
I could not find comparable overall statistics for Ukraine. That in itself says something: we don't even count what we lose.
When war strikes the networks
Everything I described above costs hours and money in peacetime. Under Russian strikes it costs heat, light and water for millions of people.
The scale has been officially assessed. According to the joint RDNA5 needs assessment (Government of Ukraine, World Bank, European Commission, United Nations, February 2026), as of 31 December 2025 direct damage in Ukraine exceeded $195 billion. In the energy sector, subject to increased attacks in the winter of 2025–2026, damaged or destroyed assets grew by approximately 21% since the previous RDNA4, including power generation, transmission, distribution and district heating. Energy recovery needs are estimated at nearly $91 billion over the next decade. 14% of housing has been damaged or destroyed, affecting over three million households.
The strikes hit not only networks but memory. On 25 February 2022, the second day of the full-scale invasion, two shells hit the regional SBU building in Chernihiv. The head of the State Archival Service, Anatolii Khromov, said the archive unit was completely destroyed by fire: "We lost up to 13 thousand documents on the Soviet regime's repression of the people of Chernihiv region" (my translation). As of 29 September 2026, UNESCO has confirmed damage to 563 cultural sites, including 24 libraries and 5 archives. A document that existed in a single paper copy cannot be restored after a fire.
Now picture a repair crew arriving at a destroyed substation or a damaged heating main. If there are up-to-date as-built drawings, accurate diagrams, a digital twin of the facility, the crew knows what was there, what can be connected and what must be ordered. If there are not, they must first figure out how it was built. Find people who remember. Dig to see. Under the threat of a repeat strike. Every such hour is hours without heat and water for people.
I have no overall figure for how much missing documentation has slowed restoration in Ukraine. As far as I know, nobody keeps such statistics. But the logic is simple: what we did not document before the war now has to be reconstructed at the worst possible moment. War turns peacetime indifference into a price paid in cold apartments.
Knowledge that retires
There is another form of unfinished work, the quietest one. Knowledge that exists only in someone's head.
The old foreman who knows where the pipe really lies because he laid it himself in 1987, and on the map it is five meters to the left. The engineer who remembers why this relay is set exactly this way. When such people retire, or sadly leave forever, their knowledge leaves with them. If it was not written down, it is gone.
That is what my article Preserving knowledge for those who come after us is about. I am more and more convinced that documenting is not bureaucracy. It is a form of respect for those who will come after us.
How many delays every creator faces
Each of us is a creator in something. An engineer, a programmer, an entrepreneur, a homeowner, a parent.
And everyone who creates runs into the same things again and again:
- there is no documentation, so we must recover what was once known;
- there is documentation, but it is outdated and cannot be trusted;
- the person who knew has left;
- something was started but not finished, and first we must figure out what was actually done.
Each stop is a week here, a month there. Multiply by the number of people in a city, a country, the world. How many medicines were not invented in time, how many bridges not built, how many companies never founded just because someone once did not finish their part. I don't know the exact number. I think nobody does. But I am sure it is larger than anything we can imagine.
There is a precise parable about this in the Gospel of Luke: "For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?" (Luke 14:28, KJV), lest people say: "This man began to build, and was not able to finish" (Luke 14:30, KJV).
Rebuilding Ukraine and documentation
We will have to rebuild a great deal. Energy, water supply, heating, roads, whole cities. And I see two roads.
The first: rebuild quickly, however it turns out, and again leave our descendants blind grids, "New" folders, and diagrams in one person's head.
The second: rebuild and document at the same time. Every new line, every pipe, every node goes straight into a digital model, into GIS, in an accessible and understandable form. It takes a bit longer today. But it is cheaper for everyone who comes tomorrow.
I am, of course, for the second. That is exactly what we dedicate our work at M1MT to.
What you and I can do
- Finish things. Fewer tasks, but to the end, to the state of "usable without me".
- Leave a description behind. At home: a wiring and plumbing diagram, photos of walls before plastering. At the office: where things are, who is responsible for what. In code: a README, comments, tests.
- Record people's knowledge while they are still around. Interviews with experienced colleagues, videos, notes.
- Pay down technical debt regularly, not once a decade.
- Demand documentation from contractors. I wrote about this in The cost of being undemanding.
- At the community level: a single digital layer of engineering networks, updated with every repair and every new facility.
The words of Ecclesiastes are very close to me: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest" (Ecclesiastes 9:10, KJV). For me this is not only about diligence. It is about the fact that knowledge I did not leave behind will not remain after me.
Instead of a conclusion
Indifference seems free. In reality it just shifts the bill to someone else: to my future self, to colleagues, to a successor, to our children, to the country. And the bill comes with interest.
A few questions I would love to hear your answers to:
- What have you started and not finished? What would it take to close it?
- Do you have a diagram of the engineering networks of your home or office? If not, who knows where everything runs?
- Whose unfinished work slowed you down the most? And what are you leaving to those who come after you?
- What knowledge in your team exists only in one person's head?
- What, in your view, must change for communities and the country to have quality engineering documentation?
Share in the comments. I am genuinely curious.