Word list · 19 words
Words to sound smarter at work
Most offices share the same handful of problems: the meeting that spends an hour on the trivial item, the project that grows every week, the target everyone learns to game. Most of them already have a name, and using the right one turns a vague complaint into a point people can act on.
Sounding smart is the easy half; the risk is using a term slightly wrong in front of someone who knows it. Each entry gives the exact meaning and where the name comes from. For the wider vocabulary of working life, see the workplace terms map.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
Parkinson's Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion — paired with a second claim, that bureaucracies grow at a steady rate regardless of the work to be done.
Work & Business
Bikeshedding
A group spending disproportionate time on a trivial, easily understood item while waving through the complex, expensive one.
Work & Business
Goodhart's Law
Once a measure is used as a target, people optimise the measure and the measure stops describing what it used to describe.
Work & Business
Peter Principle
In a hierarchy, people are promoted on performance in their current job until they reach one they are bad at — and then stay there.
Work & Business
Yak Shaving
The long chain of fiddly, unrelated-looking sub-tasks you must complete before you can do the thing you actually sat down to do.
Work & Business
Scope Creep
Uncontrolled growth of a project's scope after work has started, usually because the scope was never properly defined in the first place.
Work & Business
Mission Creep
A mission quietly expanding past its original objective, one reasonable-seeming step at a time, until the goals no longer resemble the mandate.
Work & Business
Analysis Paralysis
Over-analysing a decision until no decision gets made, so that the delay often costs more than simply choosing would have.
Work & Business
Sunk Cost Fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy is the pull to keep spending money, time or effort on something because of what you've already put in — even when none of it can be recovered and stopping would leave you…
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias is drawing conclusions from the things that made it through a selection process while never seeing the things that didn't — so your evidence is systematically the wrong sample.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Anchoring Bias
Anchoring bias is the tendency to let whatever you consider first drag your judgement toward it — usually a number, but not always — even when it is irrelevant, random, or obviously made up.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Decision Fatigue
The deterioration in decision quality after a long run of decisions — a drift toward the default, the safe no, or no choice at all.
Work & Business
Deep Work
Focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task — work that creates new value, improves skill, and is hard to replicate.
Work & Business
Timeboxing
Fixing the time available for a task in advance and treating that limit as immovable, so the scope flexes instead of the schedule.
Work & Business
Flywheel
A heavy rotating wheel that stores energy and holds a machine at a steady speed.
Work & Business
Zugzwang
Zugzwang is a chess position where you'd be fine if you could pass — but you must move, and every legal move makes things worse.
Rare & Beautiful English
Kairos
Kairos is the right moment — when circumstances have opened a window that will close again.
Philosophy & Ways of Living
Phronesis
Phronesis is the skill of working out the right thing to do in a particular situation, and actually doing it.
Philosophy & Ways of Living