the.com/yak shaving
the nine-step detour you take to avoid doing the one thing you meant to do.
means a seemingly pointless task that turns out to be a prerequisite for a prerequisite of your actual goal.
from coined at the mit media lab in the 1990s, popularized by a ren and stimpy episode about shaving a yak to get a nickel to buy balloons to make a device to fix a leaky faucet — the joke being how absurdly far removed the task is from the goal.
first documentedjargon file entry, mid-1990s hacker culture
related termscope creep, but self-inflicted and recursive
classic triggerfixing your dev environment before writing code