Yak shaving came from a Ren & Stimpy episode, and it explains your lost days
Yak shaving is the chain of prerequisite chores that eats the day before the real task begins. Where the term came from, how it differs from procrastination, and a hop-count test.
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“I’ll send the invoice. First I need the template, which is in the old accounting tool, which wants an update, which needs a newer operating system, which needs 40 minutes and a charger, which is in the car.” It is now 11 a.m. and nothing has been invoiced.
That is yak shaving: a chain of small prerequisite chores, each reasonable alone, that carries you away from the thing you sat down to do. It differs from procrastination in one respect that matters, which is that every step feels like progress.
What is yak shaving, and where did the term come from?
The usual credit goes to Carlin Vieri, who coined it at the MIT AI Lab in the 1990s (Wiktionary dates his time there to 1993 to 1998). The name comes from a segment at the end of “The Boy Who Cried Rat!” (1991), the sixth episode of the first season of The Ren & Stimpy Show, in which “Yak Shaving Day” is a Christmas-like holiday where participants wait for a shaved yak to float by. In an account quoted on Deane Barker’s site, Vieri says he reached for the phrase when sending a document overnight turned into getting admin permission, opening a shipping account and obtaining a purchase order.
Jeremy H. Brown spread it. In a February 2000 email to an MIT mailing list he wrote that “our very own Carlin Vieri invented the term, and yet it has not caught on within the lab.” Scott Hanselman gave programmers their standard illustration in 2014, a request to deploy a website that unfolds into passwords, deployment methods and a broken connection string, answered with “I’m still shaving this yak.” Before that, Seth Godin’s “Don’t Shave That Yak!” (5 March 2005) carried the idea to a general audience through a car wash that ends at a zoo.
How is yak shaving different from procrastination?
Procrastination avoids the task. Yak shaving serves it, badly. You are not dodging the invoice; you are sincerely trying to enable it, and each hop passes the “is this necessary?” check because it really is necessary, given the hop before it. That is why the procrastination trap advice about shame and avoidance does not fit. Nobody is hiding.
It also differs from estimation errors. The planning fallacy is underestimating the duration of the task you can see, and Hofstadter’s law is the same miss recursing on itself. A yak chain is made of tasks that were never on the list. You priced the invoice at ten minutes, correctly. What you could not price was the unseen network of things the invoice depended on. Perfectionism is another cousin, but it adds work to the task itself, while a yak chain adds work to everything around it.
Is there a quick test for a yak chain?
Here is a heuristic from this article’s author, not a research result: the three-hop rule. Before starting, count how many prerequisites sit between you and the real task. One or two hops is ordinary preparation. At four or more, stop and write the count down.
The writing matters more than the number. Chains stay invisible because each hop is judged on its own, against the hop before it. Putting “invoice, template, tool update, OS update, charger” on a page shows a five-hop path to a ten-minute job, and the cheaper routes (retype the template in a plain document, send it as a message) become obvious in a way they never are from inside hop two.
Why is the first yak usually the morning?
The first prerequisite of nearly every task is that you are awake and upright, and it is the one prerequisite most people leave soft. “I’ll start once I’m up properly” becomes a snooze, then coffee, then shower, then “let me clear the inbox first”. By the time the chain ends, the day has been shaved down to its afternoon. Why the night version of you cannot predict the morning version is the same blind spot seen from the other side: bedtime-you prices the morning as free.
If you treat waking as hop zero and make it non-negotiable, the chain at least starts on time. This is the one place DontSnooze fits: when the alarm goes off, you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, or a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends. Hop zero stops being a decision. It is an iPhone app, available at dontsnooze.io, and it does nothing about hops one through five. You still have to count those yourself.