Meeting Monstrosities
The dreadful task for the meeting organizer following a meeting.
What is meeting minutes?
Something you do with every external email to avoid risk losing your job.
What is forward to SAFE?
The most common thing to happen when your workload has reached capacity.
What is get assigned more work?
This employee loves spending hours engaging in unproductive conversations.
Who is The Chatty-Cathy?
A word commonly used by leadership and also recommended by your car manufacturer that you do yearly for tire maintenance.
What is alignment?
The duplication of disabling audio transmission.
What is "double muted"?
The acronym used in email when someone indicates they've written a summary of the overly wordy email that you'll never read.
What is TLDR (too long, don't read)?
The seemingly endless list of work that you own but your stakeholders want to control.
What is a backlog?
This employee chooses work over any sort of social life. They are the first one in and the last one out, even working on weekends.
Who is The Workaholic?
The roundabout way leadership tells us that everyone is responsible for a particular work item and we probably need to drop everything we were working on to work on something else with everyone else.
What is all hands on deck?
The statement made when a meeting organizer ends a meeting early and is implying they've presented you with a gift in the form of a common social construct.
What is "I will give you time back"?
This feature is used to avoid people giving excuses when they didn't see an important email.
What is a read receipt?
Is necessary to know in order to get work done, but depending on who you ask, the answer may be very different.
What is priority?
This employee loves to find ways to hand off work to other people or avoid work altogether.
Who is The Slacker?
A nautical reference that means "trying to fix everything at once."
What is "boiling the ocean"?
The form of communication that should have been used when a meeting wasn't necessary.
What is an email (or chat)?
The professional way to start a response when what you really want to say is, "you completely misunderstood my last email, you idiot!
What is let me clarify?
A portmanteau describing the practice of pretending to embrace agility while behaviors are still in line with traditional project management.
What is "Wagile" or "Scrumfall"?
This employee gets under everyone's skin by always going above and beyond and making sure everyone knows it, too. They raise the bar and as a result, make everyone else look bad.
What is The Overachiever?
What every project is defined as, and ultimately leads to chaos and a never-ending list of work.
What is top priority?
A polite phrase used during a group meeting to signal the conversation has entered a topic that requires a smaller audience.
What is "take this offline"?
What is "per my last email"?
Based on a study done by Statistica.com, 61% of respondents admitted this was their biggest distraction when working from home.
What is social media?
This employee finds ways to discredit good work and share with everyone why something actually shouldn't be celebrated.
Who is the Negative Nancy?
Used to fix other's mistakes, internal processing gaps, system configuration issues, and anything else that the right authority figure wants to have immediate attention on.
What is an escalation?