River: Yak shaving

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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