Hal fixing a light bulb (from Malcolm in the Middle S03E06 - Health Scare)

This short scene from Malcolm in the Middle is the best explanation I've found of ADHD as an adult: [VIDEO] He tries to turn on the light, the bulb is dead, unscrews it, then as he's getting the bulb the shelf in the cabinet it's in is loose. He gets a screwdriver to fix the cabinet, but the rails on the drawer the screwdriver's in are squeaky. He gets some WD-40 to fix that, but the can of WD-40 is empty. He then gets in the car, which refuses to start. Then his wife gets home, and he's underneath the car covered in motor oil. "Hal, did you replace that light bulb in the kitchen?" "WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M DOING?!".

If you're yak-shaving correctly, you're laying the groundwork for future tasks. If you do it incorrectly, it's more like Malcolm's dad [1], who is distracted by subtasks that are only minimally related to the initial goal. Devs get the two mixed up quite often. Usually on Monday mornings... 1. [VIDEO]

If anybody's using it like that, it's totally lost its meaning. The whole concept is that sometimes to get result A you have to a total laundry list of seemingly unrelated tasks to clear the way. This scene[1] from Malcolm in the Middle almost illustrates it perfectly except it's more Hal getting distracted on side quests that were spawned because he tried to change a light bulb... [1] [VIDEO]

I've always considered this Malcolm in the Middle scene to perfectly explain Yak Shaving (a number of years before Yak Shaving was a thing). [VIDEO] But as you mentioned, No Yaks included however

Find out their frame of reference, look for comparable concepts in the real world. For technical debt, this scene from Malcolm in the Middle (S03E06) [VIDEO] might be a good comparison. If you refuse to explain relevant concepts to your PM, as a neighbouring commentor suggests, that increases the knowledge gap between you (or your team) and the PM. I think it's in the best interest of both the team and the PM that they have a shared understanding of what happens within a project. On the other hand, if the PM is not interested in any of those details, that is a sign that they might not be a good fit in that part of the organisation.

> I've often thought about that when there's a work crisis: If I'm the second on the scene, what can I do to support those fighting the fire right now, before jumping in. A lot of it depends on the size and skill-set of your team and the escalation routes available to you, but in general (and off the top of my head): - Get the first people on scene to give a summary of the problem as they know it. Make sure everyone actually agrees on what the problem is and what symptoms have been observed. Understand what areas people are currently investigating and make sure they aren't trampling over each other or actually making the situation worse [1] - Make sure the situation hasn't evolved whilst the first on scene have been investigating the initial symptoms. It's easy to get lost in the weeds digging into a handful of monitoring alerts only to look up and realise there's now 300 and the original problem is only a small part of what's going on. - If there isn't one already and you're not better doing something else, become incident commander. When done right it's an extremely important and useful role. - Take over external communication and protect the team from distractions - Start assessing escalation options - Take copious notes and keep a timeline - Act as a shared memory and keep people honest - Have a less panicked, wider (non minutia) view of the problem - Start collating and pulling up documentation/schematics so the people at the coalface can quickly query it rather than get

(Non short video format - [VIDEO] ... When in the office I had a QR code of that so people could scan it and understand what I was working on)

This is significant semantic drift from the original meaning of yak shaving. Building your own is great, but it's not yak shaving. Yak shaving is fixing fractal brokenness that you notice while punching through layers of existing systems to finally fix the root cause of the original thing you cared about. See, e.g. Hal replacing a lightbulb: [VIDEO]