when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp

English

Proverb

when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp

1. It is easy to lose sight of one's initial objective, becoming caught up in subtasks or in tasks only tangentially related to the original goal.
   • For quotations using this term, see Citations:when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.

Usage notes

• Numerous variants exist, using other body parts ("eyes", "ears", "ass"/"arse", "ankles", "armpits", etc) in place of "neck" and replacing "initial objective" with just "objective" or with "mission", "goal" etc.

See also

• yak shaving
• bikeshedding
• XY problem
• if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging