chase one's tail

present singular third person chases one's tail · participle present chasing one's tail · participle past chased one's tail · past chased one's tail

1. idiomaticTo busily try to perform many tasks or to repeatedly revise one's plans, especially with inefficient use of one's time and limited results.

   Baby, I know places we won't be found, and They'll be chasing their tails trying to track us down

   2014 October 27, Taylor Swift, Ryan Tedder, “I Know Places (Taylor's Version)”, in 1989 (Taylor's Version), performed by Taylor Swift, published 27 October 2023

   5 more examples

   People wanting to get married . . . would have to trail around separately to arrange flowers, cars, a photographer, the cake and a reception venue. . . . "At the moment, they have to chase their tail making sure all these things are done."

   1994 August 4, Lynn Eaton, “Planning a wedding in one easy stop”, in The Independent, UK, retrieved 26 Jun 2014

   "You're forever chasing your tail when you're dealing with such large areas. . . . It was difficult to see how we would ever get on top of the problem."

   2001 July 2, Lisa Clausen, “Warren Peace Australia missed its first chance to wipe out the rabbit scourge”, in Time, retrieved 26 Jun 2014

   The phone rings pretty much immediately and I have a conversation, usually apologising for something or explaining why I haven't managed to do something. I'm always chasing my tail.

   2006 August 14, Natalie Hanman, “Hidden passions”, in The Guardian, UK, retrieved 26 Jun 2014

   “If you end up changing your strategy based on hot or cold tendencies, more often than not, you’re chasing your tail and you’re actually destroying value rather than sticking to what you know is right based off the data over a longer period of time,” Luhnow said.

   2012 August 12, Tyler Kepner, “Astros Begin Again, Starting With Youth and Hope”, in New York Times, retrieved 26 Jun 2014

   What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq.

   2014 November 17, Roger Cohen, “The horror! The horror! The trauma of ISIS [print version: International New York Times, 18 November 2014, p. 9]”, in The New York Times

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see chase, one's, tail.