Wasting disproportionate time debating trivial details (button colors, variable names) while ignoring the hard, important parts of a project.
Bikeshedding in practice is often accompanied with aggressive arguments because some (or both) sides just really want to be right about something, as a way to offset their real worry, despite neither choice solves the…
So you need people to be prepared to stand up and say, "hang on, is this really important or are we just bikeshedding here?"<br>When we started doing this, we found that the bikeshed discussion would often be a conseq…
Wasting disproportionate time debating trivial details (button colors, variable names) while ignoring the hard, important parts of a project. Parkinson's Law of Triviality — easier to argue about a bike shed than a nuclear reactor. Every team falls into it quarterly.
"The team spent two hours bikeshedding the error message wording."
bikeshedding means Wasting disproportionate time debating trivial details (button colors, variable names) while ignoring the hard, important parts of a project. It's mostly used in casual online conversation. It's casual and generally safe with friends and online. It's standard online vocabulary; nothing inherently concerning about hearing it.
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The moment when trivial-detail obsession reaches such a profound level that it becomes almost impressive — the pinnacle of productive-feeling unproductivity. Peak bikeshedding is what's happening when a team has held six meetings about the welcome email subject line, the Notion page has seventeen nested sub-pages about font choices, and the actual product hasn't been touched in two weeks. It often gets called out in retrospectives, right after everyone realizes the sprint was technically very busy and completely useless.
The mental state a team or individual enters when they've stopped solving real problems and started obsessing over inconsequential choices. Bikeshedding mode is active when you've been arguing about naming conventions for forty-five minutes, the Slack thread about logo kerning is longer than the product spec, and nobody can remember what the meeting was originally about. It's not malicious — it's usually what happens when a group is anxious about the hard stuff and subconsciously retreats to easy debates instead.
When a team's fixation on minor details actually causes the big thing to fail — the ultimate irony of bikeshedding. A bikeshedding fail isn't just wasted time; it's when the obsession over unimportant choices directly contributed to missing the deadline, losing the client, or shipping the wrong thing. The logo was perfect. The product was broken. The meeting ran three hours. Nobody noticed the launch date passed. That's a bikeshedding fail of the highest order.
Bikeshedding in practice is often accompanied with aggressive arguments because some (or both) sides just really want to be right about something, as a way to offset their real worry, despite neither choice solves the…
bikeshedding means Wasting disproportionate time debating trivial details (button colors, variable names) while ignoring the hard, important parts of a project. It's mostly used in casual online conversation. It's casual and generally safe with friends and online. It's standard online vocabulary; nothing inherently concerning about hearing it.
"bikeshedding" is slang. It means: Wasting disproportionate time debating trivial details (button colors, variable names) while ignoring the hard, important parts of a project. Register: casual. Use it in: casual conversation and online posts. Avoid in: formal writing and professional emails.
“Bikeshedding in practice is often accompanied with aggressive arguments because some (or both) sides just really want to be right about something, as a way to offset their real worry, despite neither choice solves their real problem.”
“So you need people to be prepared to stand up and say, "hang on, is this really important or are we just bikeshedding here?"<br>When we started doing this, we found that the bikeshed discussion would often be a consequence of too many people who didn't really have a stake in the outcome being involved in the decision.”
“Bikeshedding in practice is often accompanied with aggressive arguments because some (or both) sides just really want to be right about something, as a way to offset their real worry, despite neither choice solves their real problem.”
“So you need people to be prepared to stand up and say, "hang on, is this really important or are we just bikeshedding here?"<br>When we started doing this, we found that the bikeshed discussion would often be a consequence of too many people who didn't really have a stake in the outcome being involved in the decision.”
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Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
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