Yak Shaving
(noun) The seemingly endless series of prerequisite tasks that must be completed before you can accomplish your original goal, often leading you far away from what you initially set out to do.
Sarah started by wanting to deploy a simple web app, but first she needed to update her Docker configuration, which required upgrading her local environment, which meant backing up her files, which led to organizing her entire project structure—three hours later, she was still yak shaving instead of deploying.