Wiktionary Says¹

Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem
A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task

Sheesh, this happens a lot of times. Whenever I have to create a slide, using MDX Deck is sometimes a pain 😭 I'd often meander off to some dependency fixes and theme changes and won't get the Job done at last. Sheesh, have to change this.

It's like checking GitHub for a project and then you end up going through a series of unfortunate events and getting to something else. 😬

yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task.²