Have you ever started to work on a task and suddenly you realized that said task requires some other little task(s) to be finished beforehand. That's yak shaving for you, the tl;dr version. You've probably done this multiple times and you did even realize it. Back in 90s a Ph.D. at MIT by the name of Carlin J. Vieri produced this term to describe 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...