What is the name of this common anti-pattern When you work on a project, for instance a program in the computer science field, many people pause or "bypass" work on it to work on a side project, often smaller and often a "helper" project, whether being a website, forums, marketing or else.

This is a common-anti pattern that leads to an infinite cycle of getting increasingly far from the main and most important top priority product.

Now my question is what was the name of this problem?
Surely there must be a scientific name and description for that.
You could be talking about a number of issues.  You could be talking about


Freudian defense mechanism repression
Distraction
Procrastination or
Deferring


Maybe you are talking about something else entirely.

The thing is not all observations necessarily need a "scientific" name for them in psychology or neuroscience and whatever the situation is, it would need a lot of background information to determine exactly what it is and how it manifests itself.

As it stands right now, the question could be deemed open to opinion, especially when Freudian and Neo-Freudian psychology is considered by some here to be pseudoscientific.