(Low Hanging Fruit 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.)

Low Hanging Fruit

Simply put, the low-hanging fruit are those opportunities you don’t need a ladder to harvest. You can easily reach up and pick the low-hanging fruit with little to no effort.

Unless your business is picking fruit, describing anything as low-hanging fruit makes you sound like an annoying Captain Obvious to most of your subordinates; and Captain Oblivious to the rest.

You’re so annoying, in fact, you even chose to use the low-hanging fruit of annoying sayings.

Although you delight in your own sense of cunning – and you fancy yourself a genius of creative thinking – you’re not even trying! You’re too lazy to speak clearly and too lazy to produce your own euphemism for the obvious, quick, or easy opportunities in your business.

Why call everything low-hanging fruit? Why not say “potatoes on the ground” or “fat squirrels” or “dead cats?” At least you’d get the rest of us thinking; pique our interest; get us wondering what in the world you’re talking about.

Instead, you settle for the mundane, overused, annoying phrases your grandparents used when they weren’t quilting a shawl with their belly button lint.

Yes, given so many managers have lost all imagination when it comes to being annoying, we wanted to create a new annoying business phrase: quilting a shawl with your belly button lint. Feel free to use it to mean someone who is mindlessly working on something that is useless and likely to fail.

Replacement phrases: Obvious, quick, or easy opportunities

See also: Work Smarter, Not Harder

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