Many of us, have read GM-sections in RPG, RPG blogs, forum discussions, and sometimes books about the storytelling art.
All of these contains tons of interesting tips/techniques (and some will contradict each other, you don’t GM a gritty mega-dungeon and high-school drama game the same way), so I am curious which ones are your favourite and how do you use them in your game
Sometimes that can be fun, but only if everyone at the table is onboard for a wild tangent. If the other players are bored as shit while the special snowflake starts a unicorn breeding operation, it’s time to use that No. And you, the DM, are included in that too; if your players want to drag you off to write every book in the library and that’s not fun for you, you have the right to say “hey maybe you should play the game I made for you instead.”
I think that also depends on the tools/rules you can use. If I feel that this unicorn ranch is something only one character is interested in, I would propose a clock. We decide what they want to achieve in the end, efforts are a personal project with one roll per session/adventure, the spotlight can be kept short (remember, one roll in a while). And who knows? Maybe there will be a hook or mcguffin for me to use later on?