Yak shaving has a presumed negative connotation, but most in the Eternal Order of Yak Shavers truly enjoy shaving yaks.

But not all Yaks have that luxurious, sumptuous hair that truly satisfies a Yak Shaver. These should be immediately relegated to the Yaklog.

The problem with yak shaving isn’t any particular yak or even that we put yaks between ourselves and our deepest desires. The real problem is when a yak just isn’t a good enough yak and we still allow it to stand in our way.

Before I “completed” my blog, I suddenly realized I needed to have footnotes. Beautiful, luxurious footnotes that were clickable inline, could be typed inline in MultiMarkdown, could contain rich media… And of course, I needed to finish this before I could publish on my blog.

Those footnotes are goddamned delicious, like a fresh ear of Silver Queen sweet corn rolled in salted butter 7 ½ minutes out of the boiling pot and less than an hour from being picked off the stalk. I mean just CLICK the footnotes on this post.

Those footnotes are the kind of yak that a Yak Shaver can shave with deep pride and self-assurance. Once you realize they are possible, they become necessary, you see?

Then I decided that, before I could post on my blog, I wanted it to have a native Dark Mode…

Now, the native Dark Mode on my blog is cool (it’s in the hamburger menu), but this was not a yak that needed to stand in the way of posting to my blog. Dark Mode was definitely a yak for the Yaklog.

The absolute worst thing you can do is put Yaklog-worthy yaks into your Backlog. Filling your Real Tasks with mediocre yaks is a surefire path to total breakdown. I have burned many carefully scaffolded task systems to the ground when they became lousy with middling yaks.

When do you get to the yaks in the Yaklog? Whenever you want!

Now this can be tricky, as Yak Shavers rarely know what they want. They’re too stuck on what they need.

The only time you can’t work from the Yaklog is to unblock you from doing something you want to do.

Remember, the fact that the yak was moved to the Yaklog means that it was never really a very good yak in the first place. Yaks like these aren’t worth holding up anything to shave. They can be shaved for fun, for an experiment, for curiosity. But not for any other task.

If you’re currently shaving a yak, no matter how luxurious, of course you must finish. Leaving a yak half-shaved is disrespectful. This as a “Yak In Progress” or YIP.

If you’re stuck on a yak, you’ve “got the yips.” We understand.

Finish shaving. Then you can start your Yaklog.