Bikeshedding or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality

Bikeshedding or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is the act of spending disproportionate amounts of time discussing trivial parts of a problem instead of focusing on more important topics.

Via https://alexkondov.com/what-is-bikeshedding/

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I’m going to try and find some more links / references.

The original I remember was something like a large number of experts — plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc — all agreeing in their areas of speciality in getting a large structure built, but then everyone having an opinion on “what colour the bike shed should be painted” because it’s something trivial that everyone CAN have an opinion.

An easy “solution” some times is to check and see if something really does matter, whether we could ship and find out, or even if you got your way in a previous discussion and you might want to accept someone else’s choice this time.

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