Business Jargon: Jargon about workload
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Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work. I'm Phil. And I'm Pippa. This week we're talking more about business jargon and looking at how people talk about the amount of work they have to do. Now, you can find a transcript for this episode on our website. That's bbclearningenglish.com.

So, Phil, you know what it's like. You're at work, you've got loads to do, and then someone comes up and asks if you could do something for them or do you have time for a meeting? What do you do? It's a nightmare, isn't it? Yes. I mean, some days the only thing that happens is you have meetings and it's like you can't actually get any work done.

Yeah, and it can be really awkward when somebody asks if you're busy and you are busy because you want to kind of be available when you're at work. You often kind of want to help people. You don't want to look like you're turning down work or you're being lazy. So it's really tricky. So we need to be able to talk about our workload. That's the amount of work that we have to do. And there's actually lots of jargon phrases that could help us here, Phil. Yes. So the first one we've got is bandwidth.

And that just means the amount of space you have for a new task, which could actually be time, or just how much your brain can keep track of. It comes from the world of technology. How much information can be sent between two devices, like computers, is bandwidth. So you can say, I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to read the full report. Can you give me a summary?

Yeah, and I quite like the word bandwidth because it doesn't just mean whether you have time to do something. It's whether it's kind of worth the amount of effort and the brainpower that you're going to use to do it. So if you've got a lot of different projects on, it's actually not helpful to have another thing added on because it's too many things for you to keep track of. You don't have enough bandwidth to be able to do it. So the next one we've got here is balls in the air. Do you know what that means, Phil?

I do. And the best way to think about this is to think of a juggler. When they're juggling, you see them in the circus, they throw lots of balls up in the air and try and catch them and keep them in the air and try not to drop them. So this is about when you have lots of tasks all at once and you're trying to pay attention to all of them and not drop any of them.

Right, yeah, and we have a similar circus phrase, which is a lot of spinning plates. And there's kind of a sense of danger here that all the things that you have to do, all the balls in the air or all the spinning plates need a lot of your attention and time. You can't let one drop because, you know, the plate would smash or the ball would hit someone. So it's kind of this idea that you've just got a lot of very chaotic things going on and you really need to pay attention to them. Yes. OK, the next one.

Sounds like something from my garden here. In the weeds. And this has got a couple of different meanings. So we can use in the weeds to talk about when you have too much work to do. If you're in the weeds, you have so many problems or so much work to do that you're becoming a bit stuck.

Yeah, but we can also use in the weeds to talk about being too deep into one task or project. So you're so focused on the details of something that you forget about the bigger picture, the whole task. So I might say, oh, I don't want to get too in the weeds. And that means I don't want to spend too much time talking about or worrying about an insignificant detail in a task that I'm doing.

Yes. And then the last one we've got here is another kind of natural one. I'm swamped. I like the image there. Think of a swamp as like something really muddy that you might sink into or get stuck into.

Yeah, and this is just an informal way to say that you've got loads to do. So if you're swamped with work, it means that metaphorically you're stuck in that muddy swamp. There's loads to do and all the work's kind of around you. You've been swamped by it. I quite like that one. So if someone says, oh, you know, how's your day going? I'll go, oh, I'm swamped actually. I've got loads to do. And these are some phrases, but we've actually been asking you for the jargon phrases you hear all the time at work.

Yes, and Saloni sent this one, catch up in slower time. This is another one about workload. So if you catch up in the slower time, this means you finish your work when the workplace is a little bit less busy. So the slower time is when things are less busy. I guess what might be annoying about this phrase is that sometimes it is never slow. Sometimes it's always busy, so you never get a chance to catch up.

Yes, I know that feeling. The next one is a heavy lift. This one was from Anne and it's to talk about a difficult task that might need some extra effort or more people to work on it. It's a heavy lift. Yeah, so if a boss said, oh, we've got a heavy lift with this client, that means you need to kind of put more time and energy into working on that particular project.

The next one we've got here is putting out fires. And William sent this one in. So if you're putting out fires, it means that lots of things are going wrong at work or you have lots of unexpected tasks. So you could say, I've been putting out fires all day. And it means you've been working on lots of unexpected problems. Of course, they're not real fires, usually, unless you work in some sort of fire related industry. Yes.

That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work. Find more programmes on our website to help you with your business English, bbclearningenglish.com. And next time, we'll talk about the jargon around technology at work. Bye for now. Bye. .

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