Is creating a function to do a small repeated task an anti-pattern?

I am trying to learn best practices for programming and want to keep my code as clean as possible, but also maintainable. For example, I am running a program that waits for each element to be created.

a.waitForElementToAppear(50000);
b.waitForElementToAppear(50000);
c.waitForElementToAppear(50000);

Now, I added a function so I can easily change the 50000 without having to manually edit each one:

function waitForElement(element) {
    element.waitForElementToAppear(5000);
}

and have changed the above code to:

waitForElement(a);
waitForElement(b);
waitForElement(c);

Is it an anti-pattern to create a new function to call for a relatively small task? Is there a better approach?