River: Yak shaving

[mdlbear]

Today I introduced someone -- it doesn't really matter who, except to note that they are not a software developer -- to the concept of yak shaving, defined by Wiktionary as "Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem."

I seem to be doing a lot of it.

The best explanation I've seen is in this post (from 2005) by Seth Godin:

“I want to wax the car today.”

“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”

“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”

“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”

“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”

“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”

... And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, trying to shave a yak.

As you can see, the dictionary definition doesn't really do it justice.

Yak shaving is not to be confused with bikeshedding, a term introduced in this email in the BSD community. Bikeshedding is a form of procrastination: spending the meeting arguing over what color to paint the bike shed -- which everyone understands and has an opinion on -- while ignoring the real point of the meeting, which was to approve the design of a nuclear power plant.

Yak shaving, in contrast, is actually making progress on the important project, even though it appears to be completely irrelevant.

The trick is telling the difference. It's not always obvious, and it's way too easy for me to tell myself that I'm yak shaving when what I'm really doing is bikeshedding. As a matter of fact...

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Comments

[dreamshark]

"bike-shedding" is a great term. It can be explained in one short sentence, and it happens all the time. For instance, it's a perfect description of the Minneapolis Parks Department. Which spent most of the last 2 years debating changing the name of a lake which had recently become politically problematic. Instead of doing the job we elected them to do: managing the resources of the Park Department, dealing with bad behavior of Park Police and other employees, and other problems that they obviously preferred to avoid.

Yak-shaving, on the other hand... makes no sense without a long shaggy dog story to explain it. So it's useful if you're the sort of person who is always looking for the opportunity to tell a long and pointless joke, but not much beyond that.

[mdlbear]

Well, it's also useful to explain (to someone with enough shared context to be familiar with the phrase) why I need to find another place to put the sewing machine so that I can clear enough space on the card table to sort through several piles of unopened mail to find the cat's vaccination form so that I can board her for a day while the exterminators are treating the kitchen with insecticide.

In other words, the point of yak-shaving is precisely that there is a long shaggy dog (or yak) story without which what I'm doing right now doesn't make sense in relation to what somebody has asked me to do. Otherwise you're left with something like "you need to schedule the exterminators"... "Okay, I'll go move your sewing machine."

[redsixwing]

That's a good distinction, that yak shaving is actually making progress but in a non-obvious way.

When I'm crafting, I try to front-load all the yaks. (Need to recolor some plastic sparkly gems to go on a costume? Do that before fabric is ever cut, so I don't have to deal with the annoying stage of "90% done with a 10 hour dry time.") I sort of wish I could do that in professional life, too.

[azurelunatic]

ADHD seems to me sometimes like trying to shave the yak and getting stung by the bees that you tripped over because their hive was between you and the razor strop.

[gorgeousgary]

I've heard authors refer to "vacuuming the cat" as their excuse for avoiding a session of writing.

[kyrielle]

...but can we figure out how to sheathe the bike shed in a yak-hair coat instead of painting it??

*grins, ducks, and runs*

[technoshaman]

It's a bike-yurt?!

(and if you get the icon you're Of A Certain Age... ;)

[kyrielle]

*grins*

[technoshaman]

pocketnaomi says if you're gonna do that, you should keep the yak in there instead of the bikes. ;)

[kyrielle]

But that would make SENSE.

...well, sorta. A little. Hmm.