Rabbit holes: Why being smart hurts your productivity is a great post on staying focused without losing the value of going down intellectual rabbit holes:

The names change but the story remains the same. Designers find themselves studying fancy, new CSS3 effects when they should have been wire framing their checkout page. Hapless students find that they are on the Wikipedia page for Esperanto instead of writing notes on Norse mythology. Like Alice led into Wonderland by the White Rabbit, geeks too easily fall into “the rabbit hole”.

I won’t spoil the suggestions for you. See also: The potential and dangers of “˜squirrel projects’.

(via Brad Whittington)