I think it's pretty common in tech jobs as well. A frequent setup is that you have a longer-term project that's really interesting but not deadline-pressing, so you can only work on it when you've gotten other immediate things out of the way first. There are attempts to try to explicitly make schedule space for the interesting long-term work (like Google's 20% time), but it still often ends up that you have to get a bunch of other less-interesting stuff off your plate each day or week, before you can get to the best stuff.