For me it's a bit different. To keep myself away from TV, I committed myself to making a new track every day. So every evening, I pull all the patch cables and start from scratch. 2-3 hours later, I post the result on SoundCloud. I've been doing that since March. I can tell you, it's a very fast way to learn a lot about patching techniques.
-- Arrandan
That's a hell of a disciplined way to learn, wow. Those are cool tracks, by the way!
I feel that this approach is somewhat similar to mine; each time I patch I try to find slightly different ways to connect everything to avoid a rut where each patch sounds the same. Also, after a few days, I'm usually out of cables and decide to start anew out of boredom (there's that impatience I was mentioning earlier). I also sometimes purposely limit myself to a small selection of modules, both to push myself by setting artificial restrictions to work around and to counter the impulse to use every module and cable in every patch.
@GarfieldModular, thanks! I remember you saying in another thread that you predominantly do generative stuff. Do you typically find that you start a patch the same way each time? For example, I've realized that I rely too heavily on O_c's shift register and quantizer to start a patch, and am trying to avoid being overly reliant on that same signal path.
Appreciate all the feedback, everyone!