I am often working one on one with a teammate who is more experienced than me and higher up in the company hierarchy. He is really nice and we get on really well.
I totally understand having non work conversations off the clock, like at lunch, but this guy often will continue these conversations while we are working too. Sometimes they are sort of related (new technologies in our industry) and sometimes completely unrelated (hobbies we have in common).
He is much more experienced than me and is someone I respect a lot and is not my manager but on manager level in the company. I do try to move the conversation back to work but (1) I don't want to be very rude and (2) he is easy to talk to and sometimes I forget.
If it were just 5 minutes I wouldn't be this worried but on Friday we debugged together for 2 hours and about 1/3 of the talking wasn't directly task related. I am starting to feel like this is making us progress slower with work.
I don't know if this is a big deal. Am I worried about nothing and it's normal for people working together to get distracted by conversation like this? I don't want to make a big deal about this if it's nothing and just normal.
I did do a search and found a question "how to get someone to get to the point" but this is different, my coworker isn't verbose he just talks off topic a lot.