(Drop Dead Date is an annoying business term and is just one of the 212 Most Annoying Business Phrases Managers Effuse, Confuse, and Overuse detailed in the hilarious must-have guide for every workplace: The 30,000-Pound Gorilla in the Room. Available right now on Amazon.)

Drop Dead Date

If you’ve held a real job for more than five minutes, you know most managers like to overemphasize everything. To these managers, facts aren’t nearly enough to make their point. Indeed, even facts delivered with emphasis aren’t nearly enough to properly and clearly define the urgency of a given matter.

Drop-dead date is a perfect example.

This annoying bit of business jargon simply means deadline. That’s the fact here… it’s a deadline. If a manager wanted to redundantly emphasize deadline, he or she would use “final deadline.”

But no, not your manager. For your manager, neither facts nor facts with emphasis are enough for everyone on the team to understand the importance of completing something by a certain date.

Your manager, that brilliant thinker who uses words like hustle and grind to prove how dedicated and hardworking he is, tells you a project has a drop-dead date and not simply a deadline.

Of course, for the rest of us, hearing drop-dead date makes us wish someone would.

Replacement phrases: Deadline

See also: Ask, The; Deliverables

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The 30,000-Pound Gorilla in the Room is available on Amazon