bikeshedding.
Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
Meaning & usage
Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
Procrastination.
Where this word comes from
From bikeshed + -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp and has spread from there to the software industry at large.
present participle and gerund of bikeshed
Where this word comes from
From bikeshed + -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp and has spread from there to the software industry at large.
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Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.