Desire for novelty---good or bad?

As I worked through the allotted 20 minutes of writing for the first day of October’s 30 Days to Better Writing course over in the Seanwes Community, I realized something about myself: I love novelty and struggle to maintain energy when working on repetitive content. As a copyeditor, this is particularly prevalent in my day job responsibilities, and it has me wondering––is novelty something I can master?

Adapting to a new project’s requirements and expectations can be a long learning curve, so it seems to make the most sense to become an expert in one project before moving on to a new one. And we absolutely need people who thrive in that space. 

However, once I’ve mastered a project and its quirks (there are always quirks) and spend some time with it, it’s rare that I can summon the same energy I had at the beginning of the project. I understand that this is one aspect of life that nobody can entirely avoid: work is work. Yet I’d like to believe that there’s a way to harness my preference for novelty in a way that benefits both those I work for and the clients I partner with.  

It struck me that the patterns of work in my day job are vastly different from those of my client work: every new client is a new project to be mastered, and at the end of the project, we can tie it up and call it finished. It doesn’t matter if it’s a short eBook or a whole novel, and should my relationship with a client continue, the next project is just as new as the first. 

But what about my day job? With journals, you can hardly avoid assignment and mastery, and it’s to be expected that you will have a longstanding relationship with those journals you’ve mastered (there’s one journal I’ve worked on since starting at my company over two years ago).

I guess that’s the difference between journal work and client work (at least in my case). 

When it comes to “mastering novelty,” I wonder if there’s a way to leverage this kind of desire in a job that requires more repetitive work… not just copyediting of course.
 

Do you like novelty? If so, what are some ways you keep things fresh when work becomes repetitive? How have you leveraged your preference for novelty in the workplace?