Yak shaving describes how when setting out to do something, you found you had to first do something else, which needed you to finish this other thing, and so on until you found yourself shaving a yak, or equally unrelated activity, to do the first thing you set out to do.

It's pretty common in life — tidying your room? — and particularly resonates in software development where when tackling one thing you find yourself fixing something else, which needs you to fix something else, and so on. Here's the ever brilliant xkcd on fixing problems.

The first I found of yak shaving was a short article on productivity in the first issue of Make magazine by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann.

Yak in the style of Alison Green and Adam Stower's excellent children's book, What can you Stack on the Back of a Yak?

Yak shaving

Bosses push information up to authority. Leaders push authority down to information.

This little gem is from ex-submarine captain turned leadership guru, David Marquet. Pretty much any talk by him is great, but here's an entertaining and thought-provoking talk by him I enjoyed.

See his book Turn the ship around!: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders

Push authority to information

It's been called the expectation effect. Is it a B or a 13? It appears that how we see depends on the context and what we expect to see.

This neat example is from a 1955 experiment by Jerome Bruner and A. Leigh Minturn. One of the findings, other than people seamlessly identifying a B or 13 when surrounded appropriately by letters or numbers, was that when asked to draw what they saw "as is" participants were more inclined to draw a closed or partially closed B when it was surrounded by letters. What participants expected to see appeared to affect what they did see.

Context is king