Oct
25
2005Yak Shaving
25
2005
I have a new favorite bit of lingo: “yak shaving”. Yak shaving describes something I spend an enormous amount of time doing, but for which I’ve never had a good term.
This mailing list post is supposedly the very first mention of the term on the Internet. Unfortunately, it does not actually explain where yaks come into the picture. It does, however, define the term:
You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some
stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what
you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal
relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.
Seth Godin wrote a post which better ties the term to the definition:
Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. “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, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.