Maintenance - dumb question no 1 in 2013

OK, here goes for a dumb question

Is it necessary to be in maintenance mode to do any work on the admin side?
I am guessing product work needs to be done in Maintenance mode but not sure if everything else has to be done in maintenance mode?

The shop only goes in maintenace is when mods are made in the store and tested to make sure they work.

when editing or adding products, working on orders etc shop is open for sales

no such thing as a dumb question - only dumb answers, which category the following probably falls into. But here goes anyway.
Use maintenance mode rarely. It wouldn't do to cut off a customer in the middle of placing an order.
Times to consider using maintenance are
1. If you discover a MAJOR bug,
2. You are going on holiday and hence cannot fullfil the orders placed.
3. Or when making changes to the structure of your databases or doing bulk changes on your products. At which time you should use maintenance while you use the export/import tool to download,modify and reupload the data. Naturally for as short a time as possible.
Changes to the programming should be done first on a duplicate test site, either on your host or on your local machine.
When satisfied, then upload the program changes to the live site, usually without using maintenance mode.
Changes to individual products should be done live without maintenance override.
Your own common sense should guide you as to how necessary maintenance mode is. Ideally you never have to use it. Hope this helps.

Maintenance mode has NOTHING to do with making changes via admin.

All maintenance mode does is disable the front end of your store - customers will see "We are sorry but the shop is currently closed for maintenance" or whatever the heck the message says and will not be able to view or shop on your store.

Unless you want to put your store offline to customers, do not turn it on in settings.

Thanks all.

@ labeshop, I'm redoing all my meta descriptions after reading your excellent post on this forum. Thank you for making it clear as I was not really clued up about them.

No problem. Glad I could help