[buzzybee]

It helps to allow yourself to be philosophical about what you're writing. Sometimes a generalization just moves around the problem. Sometimes the generalization you want competes badly against cut and paste.

Increasingly I try to find a strategy that transitions towards the generalization over time by following a path of "lower friction instead of greater friction." It's easy to increase friction by adding a new configuration step, new concepts and idioms that are discordant with the rest of the environment, and then the point of doing it gets lost - you don't want to pay for that overhead most of the time, you can't ship code that way.