"too busy running alongside the bike, to get on and ride"
That's freaking hilarious. Love it XD and very accurately describes so many situations I've seen. "Why don't you just [do this thing that would make this thing you're doing about a hundred billion times quicker and easier]?" "Don't have time".
I'm on the other end of the scale, I will spend so much time learning and tooling that it will regularly feel like a waste of time that would have been infinitely better spent just getting on with it and getting the work done even if in an inefficient manner. And sometimes this has proven to be the case (the techniques I was attempting to learn don't work for whatever reason but yay now I know they exist I guess? And every now and again they come in useful for something later) and other times it has paid off (the couple of months I spent creating and porting my new notes systems for my projects, work and roleplaying has made finding/organising things a hell of a lot quicker and easier for example).
Ah - this is the other end of the scale for sure! This is often where the engineer types are - never knowing enough to get the job done, even though they know enough to get it done well enough.
Learning is never really a waste if learning things that can be used to compound, or lessons that can give guidance. But, I think it still takes some thought as to where time is best spent. maybe a pareto 80:20 for learning too - 80% of the time on what is likely to help - 20% of the time on what might not help, but is interesting to know :)