Idiom that means “to do something that yields no result”

Question

Is there an idiom that means “to do something that yields no result?”

I don’t know if the idiom “to carry water to fill up a dry well” exists in English.

Answer 1

Spinning Your Wheels is used to indicate your efforts are not yielding results. This is a reference to a vehicle's tires spinning but failing to find adequate traction to move the vehicle.

Answer 2

In addition to those already mentioned here, I'd like to submit:

beat a dead horse

Waste energy on a lost cause or a situation that cannot be changed.

I'm partial to this rather colorful idiom for doing something that yields no result, the implication that beating it isn't going to make it do anything you want it to do, make it hurt any more, or make it any deader. By the way, the British tend to say "flog" instead of "beat" for this idiom.

There are also several that are more specific:

"Preach to the choir" means argue, rant, or go off about something or someone that yields no result because the person or persons hearing it are already on one's side and are not in need of convincing.

"Get blood from a turnip/stone" means try to get something from someone or something and have it yield no result because it or they simply do not have it to give, that something often being money, though not necessarily.

"Sisyphean task" is something one repeatedly has to do that yields no result, referring to Sisyphus, who in Greek mythology was tasked with rolling a boulder uphill every day for an eternity, only to have it roll back down to the bottom just before reaching the top, accomplishing nothing ever.

Answer 3

• A fool's errand
• A fruitless labour
• A waste of time
• Flogging (or 'beating') a dead horse
• A wild goose chase
• A wasted labour
• A merry chase
• A lost cause

These idioms mean that you get nothing from the work you put in.

A few of the other suggestions you have been offered are good, but some refer to 'endless' tasks, not pointless ones. "Treading water" for example - in a literal sense, that isn't pointless. Treading water keeps your head above water and stops you drowning, but you have to keep doing it, or you sink. Idioms like this mean that your work does produce a result, but that you can't ever stop.

Answer 4

Maybe to tread water, which means that you are acting but not making any progress, much like how actually treading water keeps your head above the water but does not move you forward.

Answer 5

Spinning one's wheels and treading water are options that have been mentioned. Twiddling one's thumbs is a similar expression. To my ear these all have the connotation of "staying in place"—not progressing, but not falling back either.

To specifically say that you are expending effort, but meaninglessly, you might look at some of the answers at this ELU question. Depending on the context several of them could work, though the context of that question is a little different from yours. In particular, this answer retains the water metaphor in your original:

Emptying the sea with a thimble.

And there are others, such as

Pissing on a forest fire

which is rather vulgar of course.

Many of the answers on that question have rather precise connotations or places they would be used; "beating a dead horse" specifically means going over a topic or decision when there is no use talking about it anymore, while "a fool's errand" means a problem which is unsolvable, and "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted" means to take a course of action which would have been helpful, but is no longer. What specifically do you mean when you say "Carrying water to fill a dry well?"

Answer 6

"Running on the spot" / "Running in place" also springs to mind.

Answer 7

I don't think this is an idiom nor is it a particularly popular saying/expression but I think it's very close to what you are asking for.

Exercise In Futility

In other words: a totally pointless endeavour

Answer 8

I'm surprised no-one has yet come up with the catch-alls

Wasting your time

Getting/going nowhere

Whatever you are doing, you're not seeing any useful result.

There's also the rather less polite

Pissing in the wind

These next two are kind of 'computery', coder terms, but edging their way into broader use.

One that doesn't quite fit the question, but has a similar end result, is

Yak shaving

This is a task, A, that in order to complete requires you first to complete task B. However, in order to complete task B, one must first complete task C… The actual task you are currently doing, perhaps task M… is shaving a yak. Much, much later will you be able to get to the actual task that needed doing… Task A.

Getting further out there in terms of time wasted doing unimportant smaller parts of a larger task, is

Bikeshedding

From Wiktionary
^{The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp and has spread from there to the software industry at large.}

Late edit
I may lose friends with this one, but there is also

Polishing a turd.

It doesn't matter how much effort you put into achieving a lustre, underneath it's still a turd.

Answer 9

Not an idiom, but a relevant English word is otiose: producing no useful result; futile.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/otiose

Answer 10

It seems you want an expression to mean you are expending effort that yields no results. In this case, beating a dead horse, as already suggested, is probably the closest to your intent. This does focus on your effort.

I am unfamiliar with “to carry water to fill up a dry well” and no, we do not have this expression in English. If you would like to focus not so much on the effort but on the fact that your results prove to be worthless upon your arrival at the metaphorical well, you might consider carrying coals to Newcastle, bringing sand to the beach, or simply efforts that are dead on arrival. The first two also have the advantage of using the same metaphor of bringing or carrying something that your original expression does.

Answer 11

In the vernacular, "pushing shit uphill" is a very good fit. It is quite a well known expression in the UK, Ireland and other English speaking areas (not the USA apparently).

Obviously it is considered somewhat vulgar, so you wouldn't use it in certain contexts. However it's not on the level of "shocking" and wouldn't be a problem in most informal situations, of course depending on context.

The meaning is exactly what the OP looks for : the idea of expending effort on a completely pointless task (as explained by the related expression "shit flows downhill" - meaning it's the lower grade workers that get to clean up the mess made by their "betters"), with the added implication that the task is a particularly undesirable one. It's also seen as a rather humorous phrase.

Answer 12

To draw water from a dry well.

This means trying to get water out of a dry well, often to use for irrigation or drinking. It is one of the "impossible tasks" listed in the old folk song "Scarborough Fair":

tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Without no seam nor needlework,
And then she shall be a true love of mine.

tell her to wash it in yonder dry well,
Where no water sprung, nor a drop of rain fell,
And then she shall be a true love of mine."

Obviously one cannot draw water from a dry well, because there is no water there. This expression was probably more common when more people used wells routinely. But this Google Ngram shows some continuing use, and this {google search](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22water%20from%20a%20dry%20well%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2004,cd_max:2019&lr=lang_en) derived from the Ngram shows current uses such as:

• You can't draw water from a dry well– (Russian-English Dictionary of Proverbs and Sayings - Page 479)
• That would be like drawing water from a dry well. (Alfred Kropp: The Thirteenth Skull - Page 85 )
• They could not draw God into their lives, because you cannot draw water from a dry well. (Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music - Page 202)
• Words he'd been told could charm water from a dry well died on his lips (Loving Linsey)
• Do people seek to draw water from a dry well? Surely not. Then why should they look for peace and joy from famous or great people who themselves cannot find amusement (The Complete Fénelon - Page 50)