EOD
End Of Day. A deadline that legally means 11:59 p.m. but emotionally means whenever I get to it.
"Need this by EOD, sent at 4:55 p.m."
OOO
Out Of Office. A status that stops your calendar but not your anxiety.
"I am OOO, which means I will only check email eleven times today."
PIP
Performance Improvement Plan. The polite countdown timer from HR.
"They put him on a PIP, which is corporate for start packing."
WIP
Work In Progress. The permanent state of every document, ticket, and human in the building.
"It is a WIP has meant the same thing for two years."
ASAP
As Soon As Possible. A priority level meaning ahead of the four other things I also said were ASAP.
"Everything is ASAP, so nothing is."
FYI
For Your Information. A passive-aggressive forward that means I am creating a paper trail.
"FYI, cc your manager, my manager, and legal."
OKR
Objectives and Key Results. Goals ambitious enough to motivate and vague enough to never technically fail.
"We hit 0.7 on the OKR, which we are calling a win."
TBD
To Be Determined. The most honest two words on the entire roadmap.
"Launch date TBD. Budget TBD. Plan also TBD."
Synergies
The savings a merger promises and the layoffs it actually delivers.
"The synergies were realized. The synergies were the whole Greg department."
Touch base
To schedule a meeting about a thing that could have been a sentence.
"Let us touch base on the email I have not opened yet."
Touch base
The corporate handshake of avoidance. Promised often, scheduled never.
"We have been meaning to touch base since the last reorg."
Hard stop
A meeting boundary announced confidently and respected by no one.
"I have a hard stop at 3, said the person still talking at 3:40."
Sidebar
A meeting inside a meeting, held to avoid the meeting you are in.
"Can we take that to a sidebar, meaning can two of us escape."
Take this offline
A polite way to say this conversation is embarrassing in front of leadership.
"Great question, let us take this offline and then never discuss it."
Deep dive
A meeting that promises depth and delivers a 60-slide skim.
"The deep dive into churn somehow never mentioned a single customer."
Deep dive
What a manager calls reading the first paragraph out loud.
"He did a deep dive, by which he means he opened the doc on the call."
Whiteboard
To draw boxes and arrows until everyone feels aligned and nobody is.
"We whiteboarded for an hour and left with a photo no one would read."
Brain dump
The act of transferring your chaos into someone else inbox.
"Here is a quick brain dump, said the wall of text with no punctuation."
Post-mortem
A meeting to calmly agree the disaster was nobody fault.
"The post-mortem concluded the outage was caused by circumstances."
Cadence
A fancy word for how often we will have the meeting we all dread.
"We established a weekly cadence to discuss why the cadence is not working."