[locknitpicker]

> 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...

[narag]

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.

[hinkley]

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.

[hinkley]

> 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.