yak shaving
Also found in: Idioms.
yak shaving
Performing a somewhat trivial or meaningless task. Programmers may have to "shave a yak" along with coding, which is what they love to do. For example, creating test data for a new application may be boring and tiresome.Yak shaving may also refer to becoming sidetracked and wasting time doing something unforeseen. The term is derived from "Quest for the Shaven Yak," a video game for Sega consoles in the early 1990s.
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