Don't you just hate shaving yaks?

Today has involved an extended quantity of Yak Shaving.  Only to then find out that most that work wasn't needed for other reasons.  *table flip*

But "what the hell is 'Yak Shaving' ?" I hear you ask...  well its not quite what the name might imply (although it could be).

Simply put, "Yak Shaving" is the act of performing a number of seemingly unrelated tasks in order to achieve your original goal.

Lets have an example:

You want to take your car to a car show.

To make it look its best you want to wax it first but your car is covered in road grime and hasnt been cleaned in weeks.

So to wax the car you must first wash the car.

But the hose pipe broke last weekend, so you need to buy a new one.

In order to get to the hardware store you need to cross the toll bridge, and to save a huge amount of time you need to use your toll card which has run out of credit.

You could borrow your neighbors card, but you still have the travel pillow your son borrowed 6 months ago. 

You haven't returned the pillow yet because the yak-fur stuffing fell out.

...

So before you know it you are the other side of town, at the zoo, knee deep in dung, shaving a yak, all because you wanted to go to a car show.

So that's Yak Shaving.  Sometimes, its worth it, sometimes its not... but we need to learn to recognize the signs of the yak before it gets out of control.