chase one's tail | Idiomator

Meaning: (idiomatic)Tobusilytry toperformmanytasksor to repeatedlyreviseone's plans, especially withinefficientuse of one's time andlimitedresults.1994August 4, Lynn Eaton, “Planning a wedding in one easy stop”, inThe Independent, UK, retrieved26 June 2014: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 tochase their tailmaking sure all these things are done."2001July 2, Lisa Clausen, “Warren Peace Australia missed its first chance to wipe out the rabbit scourge”, inTime, retrieved26 June 2014:"You're foreverchasing your tailwhen you're dealing with such large areas. . . . It was difficult to see how we would ever get on top of the problem."2006August 14, Natalie Hanman, “Hidden passions”, inThe Guardian, UK, retrieved26 June 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 alwayschasing my tail.2012August 12, Tyler Kepner, “Astros Begin Again, Starting With Youth and Hope”, inNew York Times, retrieved26 June 2014:“If you end up changing your strategy based on hot or cold tendencies, more often than not, you’rechasing your tailand 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.2014October 27,Taylor Swift,Ryan Tedder, “I Know Places (Taylor's Version)”, in1989 (Taylor's Version)‎[1], performed byTaylor Swift, published 27 October 2023:Baby, I know places we won't be found, andThey'll bechasing their tailstrying to track us down2014November 17,Roger Cohen, “The horror! The horror! The trauma of ISIS [print version:International New York Times, 18 November 2014, p. 9]”, inThe New York Times‎[2]:What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has beenchasing 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.

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