I need you to be with me on this one. Pretend if you have to. But at some point, you’ve had to think of a new password and you’ve thought and thought before coming up with a great one — and the computer says no. It says no because you’ve used that one before.

Or you need to save some important document somewhere that you’ll remember and the document needs to be saved with some really clear name. You think and think, you come up with a great system for naming the file and just the right place to save it, and yeah. Same thing. A file of that name is already there.

I’m not sure you’ve had that second one, it possibly requires you to spend 15 hours a day in front of a screen. But the first one, that’s surely you as well as me.

Only, I have a new video series starting shortly and at the same time, I have an existing one that gets filmed in blocks so that episodes can roll out weekly for a couple of months. Two series, I want to say both alike in dignity, but apart from them both being about writing, I think there is a large stretch of very clear water separating the two.

So I write the pilot for the new one and have to leave the edit for a bit in order to polish up one of the episodes from this other run.

And you know where this is going.

But I didn’t

That filmed-in-a-block series is unscripted, and everything else I do is very much written. A solid seven minute sequence I wrote for the new series is what I said some six weeks ago in the unscripted one.

It’s not the same, it’s not word for word, but actually, yes, it is. The sequence is slightly different, the structure isn’t the same, but the points are identical, and there are many moments where I see myself searching for the right phrase on the unscripted one — and that is word for word what I wrote six weeks later in this other series.

Now, there’s a practical thing that the new one is due to start going out very soon and so it’s within a fortnight of the same topic being discussed. If it had been a much longer gap, maybe I’d have got away with it, but I definitely cannot now, so I’ve had to scrap the pilot and write a different one.

Except, okay, I’m now behind schedule and I have to do a little more work, if you’re not thinking boo hoo then I am.

What shook me about this was how you think — or I think — that we are trying to do something new, but we are at least sometimes locked into the same ways of thinking. The same concerns, fine, but the same words.

I want to think that I’m up for anything and always looking for the new way to do things. I have so often had events change dramatically around me and I’ve had a ball adapting to it all on the hoof.

But this video collision makes me think that in fact I am stuck in one way of thinking.

I am fighting back, though. I’ve been trying out a nicely done AI tool called Cotypist, which is dedicated to predicting not just the next word you’re going to type, but the next several. It obviously learns from you, but even before it has time to get better and better, it is startlingly good at predicting what I’m going to type.

Consequently I use this app and I suppose it saves me typing time — although I like typing — but each time it proposes six or seven words that it thinks I’m going to type, I feel it’s telling me I am that predictable.

So I will do anything to rephrase my thought, to express whatever the idea is, in some different way. Any different way. One word different, I’ll take it.

I’m just not sure how to do that rebelling against one-track thinking in real life. But I’ve got to try.