Define: "Action Item" in Business
High risk of unnecessary meetings
"A task assigned to you during a meeting. Forget about it until someone asks."
A specific task or objective assigned to an individual during a meeting.
What does "Action Item" actually mean?
"A task explicitly assigned to you that will immediately rot in the Jira backlog for three consecutive sprintsSprintsAn endless treadmill of two-week deadlines where the finish line keeps moving.."
"Your only action item from this meeting is to finalize the slide deck by Thursday."
"My only actionableActionableA buzzword used to reject a perfectly good report because the boss didn't want to read it. action item from the two-hour all-hands call was to quietly update my resume on LinkedIn."
By The Chief Waste Officer
18 years in the corporate trenches quantifying waste so you don't have to.
Related Terminology
Tired of hearing this?
Next time someone says "Action Item" in a meeting, track exactly how much company money they just wasted. Play Buzzword Bingo, generate a waste invoice, and stop the bleeding.
