TLDW examples: Sharpen your work pencil as a knife for enjoyment; Look up words in a paper dictionary so you can be accidentally exposed to nearby words; Use a bamboo ruler with only prime-numbered amounts marked; A navigation-app that gradually fades out road-names for places you travel so that you have to learn the names; ... Trashcan robots that wobble piteously near trash they can't collect in order to encourage kids to help; Kindergarden with uneven sandy schoolyard so kids learn coordination; Spigots that are made to splash you if you twist the knob too much;
> Look up words in a paper dictionary so you can be accidentally exposed to nearby words;
I've had this debate many times at work - someone is chastised for spending time troubleshooting an issue vs just restarting everything, but the same people chastising later complain that issues which cant be fixed by a restart take too long to resolve, not understanding that troubleshooting previous issues speeds debugging of future issues.
I'm one of those folks who ends up erring on the "deeper than needed" dives when there's some question or prod-bug, and I'd like to emphasize that writing up what you found is crucial getting the most benefit from the little detours.
At a minimum, that means in such a way that when I think "Oh, I saw this before" I can find it, but ideally it's in such a way that someone else getting the same log-messages or whatever can find it too, and even better if it's a ticket in the backlog.
Obviously not ever deep-dive will be productive in the end, but it's hard to know which-is-which until you've finished the diagnosis... and maybe another few months have passed too.
