I struggle with the drudge. At times I create far more work for myself than is necessary just to avoid the drudge. I would much rather teach a concept differently and try something else out than start from last year’s content and improve it from there. The thought of teaching exactly the same lessons in exactly the same way for 30-40 years of a teaching career is not even an imaginable concept for me.
In many ways, this is a massive advantage to my teaching. It keeps things fresh, means I am constantly re-evaluating my own approaches and reduces the instinct to ignore student feedback in the interests of just making my life easier. All of which are great. But it is massively inefficient and it causes me to tinker with certain approaches, make big promises to my students about how we will make things work only to abandon that plan without acknowledgment a few lessons later because I have absent-mindedly moved on to the next great idea.
Trouble is: to fix my drudge-avoidance is usually to try out a new strategy: exactly the drug that gets me in this trouble in the first place. There is no new routine that is not worth dropping the last one for. And so the cycle continues.