Rabbit holes aren’t wasted time if you come back up holding something.

Following a chain of links for an hour is not automatically wasted and not automatically useful either. The difference is whether you came back up with something: a fact you can repeat, a question worth chasing, a clear sense of how a thing works. Pure drift leaves nothing behind and is often driven by not wanting to start the other task. One of these you could defend and the other you could not.

Next time you go down one, set a limit and then write a single sentence about what you found. If that sentence is hard to produce, you were avoiding something.