Sometimes when you set out to accomplish a task, a series of unrelated tasks get in the way and demand to be finished before you can get back to what you originally wanted to do. In the IT world, this is called “yak shaving”. The term dates back some 20 years or so and refers to a song from the Ren & Stimpy cartoon. One of the earliest references can be found in an email from MIT. It’s probably a little hard to understand exactly what’s going on if you’re not an old-timer that worked on Unix systems back at the turn of the century. Malcolm in the Middle did a pretty good version of it:

It’s taken me a couple of weeks to get to the point that I could actually post an article that was more than just babbling about configuring WordPress. What the hell was I doing all that time? Well, I wasn’t sitting idle. I had a whole farm full of yaks that needed shaving.