Perhaps I should have said “tedious” sted “repetitive.”

Most jobs are by their nature repetitive, as how else does one acquire domain expertise? Seeing something for the first time and having question marks appear in a thought bubble is wildly different from having seen similar situations hundreds of times, solving the issue immediately and going about your day.

Some of these tasks are enjoyable – I didn’t get out of page design by choice, and by then I’d conservatively produced well above 10,000 pages – but others are not. For me, the benchmark is “Am I actually using my brain to solve a problem, or is this just using time that could otherwise be spent doing so?”

The latter tasks are the ones I was referring to.