Don't Repeat Yourself

In this post I want to talk about the repetition.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been adverse to repetitive tasks. It’s usually past the third repetition of something I start to think: “couldn’t I be doing something better with my time”.

Here are a few examples of things that tend to have repetition in them and the way I deal with them, or at least try to.

I love music and listen a lot to it. When I start to hear an artist or band repeat themselves without adding anything new to the experience, I get bored with it. I’m sure I’m no the only one. The solution is easy, listen to something else. Sometimes I listen to completely different music to get my head entirely out of that loop.

I like watching movies but lately I don’t watch more then 1-3 per month. When I was younger I used to watch a lot more, but as I grow older the repetitions become more obvious and therefore I watch fewer movies and more diverse ones when I do. That is probably the reason I don’t watch much TV, but instead watch more video blogs lately. They are short and most of the time unique and interesting.

In my work, every time I have to do something overly repetitive, I try to find a shortcut around it. A good example of a shortcut that many people will probably recognize is the “find/replace” feature of text editors such as notepad, word & etc. It allows you to have the software find all instances of a phrase and put another one in its place. Few years ago, I sometimes didn’t think about using that feature until I was half way through a document, but now I almost always go straight to it if I need to do multiple replacements.

I guess what I really enjoy is having fresh experiences, which is probably not different from most other people. It helps me maintaining my creative spirit. Repetitiveness dampens it. When I started to focus more on programming, in my studies at RU, and productivity in my work, it was refreshing to see this reflected in productivity frameworks like GTD and programming philosophies such as DRY.

I’ll put a cap on this rambling for now. Maybe I will write something later about the balance between not repeating yourself and doing what your good at.