Stand-up theater
A daily meeting where everyone performs productivity for nine minutes so no one has to do it for the other seven hours.
"I said no blockers for the fourth day straight. The blocker is me."
#meetings
27 entries
Parking lot
Where good ideas go to be politely euthanized during meetings.
"Great point, let us put that in the parking lot. The parking lot has no exit."
Quick sync
A meeting that is neither quick nor synchronized, scheduled because someone refused to read the thread.
"This quick sync has a slide deck and a pre-read."
Action item
A task assigned to whoever made eye contact last.
"I looked up at the wrong moment and now I own the migration."
Retro
A meeting where the team agrees exactly what to fix, then does the same thing next sprint with renewed confidence.
"Third retro in a row we committed to better estimates."
Kickoff
An optimistic ceremony held at the exact moment of maximum ignorance about the project.
"We set the deadline at the kickoff, before anyone knew anything."
War room
A meeting that escalates a minor outage into a spectator sport with snacks.
"Forty people in the war room watching one engineer fix a typo."
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."
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."
Lunch and learn
A meeting that takes your lunch and teaches you to resent it.
"The lunch and learn ran long, so it was just a learn."
All hands
A company-wide meeting where good news is announced and bad news is implied.
"The all hands was very upbeat about the very upsetting numbers."
Pre-meeting
The meeting you hold to prepare for the meeting that prepares for the decision.
"We had a pre-meeting to align before the alignment meeting."
One on one
A weekly meeting that drifts from your growth to the manager feelings.
"My one on one became therapy, and I was the therapist."
Discovery call
A meeting to discover whether the prospect will ever answer again.
"The discovery call discovered they ghosted us."
You are on mute
The most spoken sentence of the modern workplace.
"He gave a passionate two-minute point while on mute. Twice."
Camera on
A request that turns a relaxed call into a hostage situation.
"Can we get cameras on, said the slide that lost the room."
Standup
A daily call where remote workers confirm they are, in fact, still alive.
"Standup is the one time a day I prove I exist."
Circle back
To revisit a topic with the full intention of forgetting it again.
"Let us circle back next week, the polite burial of a good idea."
Synergize
To hold a meeting that produces a smaller meeting.
"We synergized for an hour and scheduled a follow-up to synergize more."