Comment by hinkley
4 days ago
I don't like that 'yak shaving' has degenerated into a synonym for boondoggle.
Some explanations of yak shaving split it into a complex form of procrastination and also necessary annoyances - friction - obstacles.
Sharpen your Tools often falls into the latter category, and it's always useful to question whether those 'necessary annoyances' are actually necessary.
It is, like you say, not always necessary to tackle those annoyances right now. But it is a situation where both the Campsite Rule and the Rule of Three have some domain. As a person whose entire job is about writing code to replace tedious and error-prone human tasks, you need to interrogate yourself any time you start thinking, "This is my life now." Because if anyone has the power to say 'no', it's us.
It's always worth spending 12-15 minutes most times you do a task that you have to do over and over again in service of trying to reduce the task from ten minutes to five or to zero. The reward for engaging in the task more fully rather than putting it off until it has to be done is that you're working toward a day when maybe you don't have to do it at all (you've automated it entirely or you've made it straightforward enough to delegate).
Hal's example is so funny because he's using both arms to scoop in everything from Column A and Column B at the same time. Everybody gets a laugh. A couple of those tasks actually had to be done. A couple could have gone on the shopping list.
I always saw it as being multiple subtasks deep into a problem, or opening too many parentheses. Yak shaving does not imply that you're wasting time, only that the task involves solving problems that feel remote to your initial objective.
For example, I want to use ES6 modules on my website, then esbuild to compile them. However masonry.js breaks it, and instead of fixing it, I decided to get rid of it, but that breaks the layout of the /guides page, and while I'm there I might as well reorganise the list of guides.
So now I'm on week 2 of the switch to ES6, but I ended up redesigning a page, writing a bunch of tests, fixing unrelated UI bugs, making a few UX fixes, making changes to the static site generator, etc etc.
I get to do that because I'm self-employed and thinking long-term, but if I was at $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER doing sprints, my boss would be wondering why I spent an entire sprint on this simple task.
> I don't like that 'yak shaving' has degenerated into a synonym for boondoggle.
What do you mean "degenerated"? The term was always a synonym for procrastination and slacking off. It's just that in some cases the procrastinator/slacker argued otherwise.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210112174206/http://projects.c...
Aside from the origin, there're situations in which you need to somehow shave the yak.
Yes, it's about procrastination, but not of the task at hand. You procrastinate in some older task that's really blocking what you need to do now.
It's chain procrastination. Oldest task blocks older task that blocks old task that blocks current task. It's evil because it overflows the task planning buffer. Also you get used to say nah when you start to think in a task in that general direction.
Maybe you should shave the fricking yak already. Or maybe you should use fake yak hair, idk.
The thing about the Mikado method is that you’re taking what from your perspective is a top down task and flipping it to bottom up. Which is for instance more amenable to refactoring, which is a bottom up task.
Sometimes when you get to the bottom you discover a shorter route backup to the top. The trap is that since you “already wrote the code” is seems a shame to delete it. But that code hasn’t been reviewed or vetted and “code is not the bottleneck”. You really do want to delete it because there’s a new version that’s 1/3 the code, and touches less of the existing system, and so will take less work to review and vet.
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> 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.
What do you think a “causal relation[ship]” means? It means need, not avoidant behavior.