A lot of people in this thread are talking about it in the context of technical debt, but I've always interpreted it as an allegory about time management: you f

A lot of people in this thread are talking about it in the context of technical debt, but I've always interpreted it as an allegory about time management: you find yourself shaving a yak when you've ‘gone down the rabbit hole’ and traversed several layers down the dependency chain of your to-do list. When you realize this is a good time to take a moment to reflect on the situation. Sometimes, the yak really does need shaving right now, but sometimes it's a result of performing a depth-first search, so to speak, and it's better to back up and take another tack, leaving the yak for later. And even if that yak really does need shaving, taking a moment to reflect on why you've found yourself shaving it can be useful to prevent frustration that the original task doesn't even seem to have been started yet.