In video games, there are many side-quests to getting to your primary quest. They might give you XP (experience) to help in your primary quest (i.e., unit testing, additional coding, etc, etc).
We sometimes discard them because – “Bah, when am I going to use this” – but then when we complete the primary quest, we begin the work to go back and clean up our side quests and think – “huh, this would have helped out a lot if I had done it sooner.”
Don’t forget the side-quests, they take longer, but they are designed for growth.