In engineering, there’s a term for when a simple task spirals into ten unrelated ones: yak shaving.
Here’s what happened last Tuesday. I opened my laptop to change the font on my blog. I told myself it’d be 5 minutes.
But the typography package was deprecated. So I updated it. The build broke because my Node.js version was too old. So I upgraded Node. That clashed with the server’s OS config. “Might as well fix that too.”
3 hours later I was reading the cgroups docs in the Linux kernel manual at 2 AM. The font was still unchanged.
Sometimes your entire day of “productivity” is just fixing problems you created for yourself. But you end up learning things you never would have looked up on purpose, so it’s not a total loss.
If you were busy all day and feel like you got nothing done, welcome to the club. You were just shaving a yak.