Perfecting the art of quiddling

I have just been reading about the origin of the word ‘bikeshedding’, which is to spend far too long on trivial tasks as a way of avoiding the important ones. I know this as ‘quiddling’ (because I’m a 16th-century kind of person), which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘To quibble or cavil about insignificant details; to fuss; (also) to busy oneself with unimportant matters or trivial tasks; to fritter away time.’ For anyone reading this on Monday morning, the answer is probably ‘all of the above’.

Bikeshedding is apparently all about arguing the trivial. At its heart is an observation by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian who, in 1957, imagined a committee tasked with approving three agenda items: a £10 million atomic reactor, a £350 bicycle shed for staff, and a £21 annual expenditure on refreshments. In the account I’ve been reading, the reactor is waved through in about two and a half minutes because the members have no knowledge of the subject and simply defer to the expert. The bicycle shed, on the other hand, draws over forty-five minutes of discussion about every possible detail. As for refreshments, that discussion runs longest of all, because of course everyone understands tea and coffee. Parkinson’s principle was that ‘the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved’. Everyone has an opinion about a bike shed; few of us have a Scooby about a nuclear reactor.

The actual term ‘bikeshedding’ seems to have been coined many years later by a Danish software developer called Poul-Henning Kamp, who applied Parkinson’s principle to open-source projects, where trivial technical choices were laboured over while fundamental structural decisions could be waved through in an instant. If the stakes are low enough, we will instinctively focus there.

Personally, I think I still prefer the word ‘quiddling’, as well as ‘spuddling’, a companion word from the same period meaning to work so superficially on a task that you only ever scratch the surface. And don’t forget the ‘eyeservant’: someone who only really gets down to it when the boss is looking. It turns out the historical dictionary has a host of words for not getting things done. And I have no doubt that, in writing this very post, I am quiddling while Rome (or Britain) burns.