> I suspect that this is not at all an unusual turn of events amongst readers here.

Definitely not. On large scale, I own most of my career to that disease. On small scale, pretty much every job I got could be attributed to something that I learned through procrastination a year or two earlier.

Absolutely the case for me too.

Switched courses to design because my chemistry tutor kept telling me off for doodling on my notes. Got into web development was because I was bored at work and started learning HTML.

Trouble is, it means that whatever I’m doing is what I should be doing some point in the future, not what I actually need to do right now...

I have another variant of this: I get code rage (which I can easily self diagnose after the fact as being simply NIH in most cases). So whenever I got stuck debugging a bunch of spaghetti, I'd go look for distractions. But because at this point, that was in a professional setting and no longer just my target for procrastination, I was looking for professionally valid distractions. So I became a team lead/manager that way. One thing leads to another and here I am. Turns out I liked that career, too.