Yak Shaving: The Hidden Costs of Shadow Work in Schools

The question isn't whether you can afford to fix these problems; it's whether you can afford not to.

Schools waste hundreds of hours of instructional prep time per year through poorly designed systems that offload administrative work onto teachers.

Unnecessary screen time breeds serious staff wellness problems as well as productivity losses.

What Does Yak Shaving Look Like?

Consider the teacher who needs to record their expenses, update their emergency contact info, or apply for PD, for example. These procedures often trigger multi-platform odysseys:

1. Go search for the form because the initiator forgot to directly link to the form in the reminder email.

2. The teacher navigates by muscle memory to one of the likely two or three different portals they remember the form might be, finds the old form (that wasn’t removed from “the old storage place”,) and fills that out and sends it. They then get a response back the next day saying “that was the old form” and get redirected to a different platform to fill out the new form, and then discover the new form requires a line manager's approval, which triggers another set of emails.

3. What should have been a five to ten minute task takes 30 minutes over two days.

This is a form of “yak shaving”– doing Z, to do X, to do Y…so you can do A– and it happens when systems are designed to be locally efficient for the department that built them, but impose significant cognitive overhead on everyone else.

Yak shaving is not at all unique to schools; it festers anywhere a culture of administrative control is pervasive; where technology adoption means "following orders." This approach prioritizes ensuring users follow a process over designing systems that make compliance seamless.

Building a Culture of Collaboration & Design Thinking

Your teaching staff didn't sign up for a second job managing and tracking shifting administrative infrastructure; they came to teach and support students. If they are avoiding a new system, creating workarounds, or flooding inboxes with questions about processes, it’s a sign there is a collaborative literacy problem, not “user resistance” or “people having technology problems” problem.

The path forward requires a fundamental shift in perspective to design and support systems that enhance people’s sense of competence and wellbeing not sometimes, but all the time.

1. Shift to a Service-Oriented, Design Thinking Mindset: Flip the framework from "How do we ensure compliance with our systems?" to "How do we design systems that make compliance as effortless as possible?” This change doesn’t just improve technology adoption rates, it plays a significant role in transforming your entire culture.

2. Foster True Collaborative Literacy/Elevate Your Community into Active Agents of Change: Staff should be designing system innovations, not just implementing them. Before you deploy any new system or process, map the task journey with real users to identify every cognitive switching cost, authentication step, and form field that requires external input or other non-intuitive extras.

3. Get Feedback Proactively- Organize sessions with staff members to gather feedback and incrementally iterate your processes until every pain point has been minimized before you launch the new process.

Yak shaving and the shadow work it creates reveals a deeper organizational issue, because when systems prioritize departmental convenience over your mission and user needs, you're not just wasting time and productivity, you're communicating that your most valuable human resources exist to serve administrative processes rather than educational outcomes.