https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YakShavingDefinedIllGetThatDoneAsSoonAsIShaveThisYak.aspx

Coined by Carlin Vieri in his time at the MIT AI Lab (1993-8) after viewing a 1991 episode of The Ren and Stimpy Show featuring "Yak Shaving Day," a Christmas-like Holiday where participants hang diapers instead of stockings, stuff rubber boots with coleslaw, and watch for the shaven yak to float by in his enchanted canoe.

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 doingto the original meta-task.

1. Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.

2. A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.

I looked at a reference manual for my car just to answer one question, but I spent the whole afternoon with my nose buried in it, just yak shaving, and got no work done on the car itself.

3. All that stuff that you need to do to solve some problem.

"Hey, Scott, can you deploy that web site?

Ok, do I have access? No, gotta get it. Passwords? Deployment technique? Web Farm? Scaling how? Web framework not configured? Oh, what about the connection string?

"Hey, Scott, is that site deployed yet?"

"No, I'm still shaving this yak."

4. An excellent example in popular culture is when Hal replaces a light bulb in the TV show "Malcolm in the Middle":