Comment by nicbou

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.