A Letter from Chris Suarez
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A YAK SHAVER
In the mountainous regions of Central Asia among the cold and ice lives a 2200 pound mammal called a yak. The yak has a large bulky frame, two horns, and two layers of long dense fur that hangs down to the floor.
I came across an expression this week while reading that I had not heard before.
Back in the mid 90’s a Ph.D at MIT, Carlin Vieri, coined the term “yak shaving” while working in the lab. “Shaving a yak” was meant to relate to doing a bunch of tasks, or many hours of work, that really didn't contribute to what you set out to do that day. It refers to when that task you decide to do leads you to another task, which leads you to another task, which leads you to another task, none of which actually lead you closer to the original task or goal you were looking to accomplish. Some may refer to this as “falling down the rabbit hole”.
Ironically while researching yaks, that may or may not have happened to me.
Vieri has worked at Apple, Pixel Qi, and currently is a Staff Hardware Engineer at Google. Originally he wanted this term to catch on and refer to when we wind up doing less useful activities either consciously or subconsciously which causes us to procrastinate doing what is most important. His team eventually started using the expression and the term is now used most in programming and coding circles. And yet, a lot of yaks get shaved in our industry as well.
So the question for this week: Have you ever shaved a yak? Shaving a yak is no easy job by the way. A male yak can produce over 55 pounds of wooly fiber each year. Yet, if we are not careful we can find ourselves yak shaving every day.
Let me give you an example:
You wake up ready to take on the world. You are committed to knocking out your lead generation at the start of the day.
You get to your home office by 8am. Coffee is on the desk. Database is open. Headset is on. You are ready to go.
You open up your email real quick to do a morning clean-out from the night before. You just revived your weekly email from Peloton reviewing your rides that week. It was a good week for you on that bike. You notice in the email though that your membership needs to be renewed. Well that’s important, so you go to grab your credit card.
Where is your credit card? You realize you left it in your car the night before so you run outside to grab it. It is 8:20am.
As you walk down your front sidewalk you realize your sprinklers aren't on. But it’s 8:20, and they always come on at 8am. It will be the 4th day of over 90 degrees so the plants will die without water. Well that’s important, so you walk over and check the timer on the sprinkler.
You realize for some reason the saved program is erased, so you reprogram the watering schedule for each day, and while you are at it you confirm that all 8 zones are working. It is 9:10am.
You grab your credit card from the car and notice that the recycling hasn’t yet been picked up from the edge of the driveway. They usually come at 6am so that’s a bid odd, but perfectly delayed as you have some recycling boxes in the garage that you had forgotten to put out the day before. Three big Amazon boxes showed up yesterday that you really want out of your garage. Well that’s important, so you run back into the house, head to the garage, and break down the boxes. You get them out to the curb just in time for them to be picked up. It is 9:35am.
You thank the sanitation worker for picking them all up, even though you had more than actually fit in your bin. He lets you know you may want to call in for a larger bin, otherwise you will get charged a bit extra each week. Well that’s important, as you’ve been trying to stick to a budget of late and avoid extra fees. You grab the phone number off the side of the truck and decide to call in so you don’t forget to do it later.
You walk back inside the house while on the phone with the garbage company and walk down the hallway back to your office. As you walk past the laundry room you realize the kids left their clothes on the floor that need to be washed. You are certain you had told them to wash and dry them yesterday because you are leaving the following morning for your camping trip. Well that’s important, so you decide to load them the washer. It is 9:45am.
You pull out the clothes from the dryer since you are already there and bring them back to the kitchen to get those folded. After all, you are on hold with the garbage company, so you might as well get something done.
You get half-way through folding the clothes when you finally get a live customer service rep on the phone. You get a larger bin set to be delivered to your home. They just need to update your account…now where did you put that credit card? It is 10:15am.
Yup, its Yak Shaving Day. Before you know it, two hours has slipped by. You have almost completed 6 different things (a few are still left undone) and so on one hand, you feel like you’ve gotten a lot done today. But as you think back to what you had committed to do that day, lead generation, it hasn’t even begun. The five or six things you accomplished all needed to be done that day. They were all seemingly important at the moment that you did them. So your brain allowed you to refocus your attention on that one thing and leave the focus from what you were previously working on in order to accomplish it.
Much of that has to do with what we allow into our visual line of sight. There is fascinating research around the power of our visual attention. Dr Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and works in the Department of Neurobiology. He teaches that the eyes are the most powerful driver and the determining factor of what we think, feel, and eventually do. Vision has such a powerful effect on our brains and our movement, which leads to our activities. Our vision drives stress, drives calm, drives our ability to move. It drives how we literally see the world and effects what we do, internally and externally.
As you think about that morning of yak shaving, actions followed your eyes. You saw the email, you saw the plants, you saw the recycling, you saw the laundry. Let’s be honest. The next thing you were going to see was the refrigerator and you’d be off to making lunch.
Here is the danger. All of those things at the moment seemed important. And they may have been. But the day before, you had committed to doing what was most important. It was that first activity that led you to even being able to have that Peloton, or install those sprinklers, or buy those items on Amazon, or purchase those clothes, or take your kids on that camping trip. You had committed to doing the work that would lead you to reaching your goals - the goals that were so important to you at the start of the year, the start of the month, the start of the week, or the start of the day. Without staying focused on the most important thing, none of those other things would be there or even matter. How we control what we see will determine how focused we become. Eliminate visual distraction.
Eliminate visual disruption. Eliminate visual diversion.Our ability to control our eyes will allow us to control our actions.
Stop shaving the yak.
Believe me, they are much cuter with hair.
Take my word for it.
Googling yak photos is a rabbit hole.
Chris
