How to Tell a Problem Is Actually Recurring

Not every painful task is worth building a system around. A guide to telling the two apart.

It's genuinely recurring if:

• It has happened at least three times, on a roughly predictable cadence.
• The steps are close to identical each time, even if the details change.
• More than one person has independently rebuilt some version of a solution for it.

It's probably a one-off if:

• It was painful, but it was painful for a specific, non-repeating reason (a one-time migration, a single unusual request).
• The "system" you'd build would need to be redesigned almost every time you used it.

Odoino's Business Assets exist specifically for the first category — recurring, real problems that have already been solved once and shouldn't need to be solved from scratch again.