faff

1. spend time in ineffectual activity.

   we can't faff around forever

1. a great deal of ineffectual activity.

   there was the usual faff of getting back to the plane

late 18th century (originally dialect in the sense ‘blow in puffs’, describing the wind): imitative. The current sense may have been influenced by dialect faffle ‘stammer, stutter’, later ‘flap in the wind’, which came to mean ‘fuss, dither’ at about the same time as faff (late 19th century).