yak shaving

• Yak shaving refers to a task that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal. This is sometimes called “going down the rabbit hole.”

source: https://americanexpress.io/yak-shaving/

• Yak shaving: when you end up doing things totally unrelated to what you were trying to accomplish initially.

Illustration: Hal replacing a light bulb - Malcolm in the Middle, S03E06 YouTube (0:42)

source: Shaving the Yak

• Yak shaving: The tedious chores that need to be performed before the Real Work™ can be done.

Not all meaningful work is fun. Not all boring work is meaningless. This is a lesson that’s dangerously easy to forget, because the modern attitude toward work makes it extremely easy to confuse “motion” with “progress”, and “busy” with “productive”.

Meta-work is the tedious chores we do before the Real Work™ to make it more efficient and productive.

The most important question we face in our working lives is this: am I working on the right things?

source: Yak Shaving: On Doing the Work Before the Work