Happy Monday, Reader! Managing projects involves lots of discussions about time. Accurate English makes it a lot easier to stay on track and keep everyone aligned.

Today you will learn how to:

• talk about delays and time limits in project management

• feel when a collocation is natural or awkward

• avoid misunderstandings in sprint planning when talking about time

And you can test your English level (B1, B2 or C1) with a quick quiz 😏

VOCABULARY

Time Collocations for Project Management

About delays

• push back → delay or reschedule to a later time/date

  collocations: tasks, deadlines, events

• hold off → delay temporarily
  collocations: actions, decisions, launches

The meeting is scheduled for Monday but you want to move it to Wednesday.
→ “Can we push back the meeting until Wednesday?”

Your team was planning to send an email but you ask to wait for a bit.
→ “Can we hold off on sending the email until we get more information?”

About limits

• time box → limit the time for something
  collocations: tasks, meetings, discussions

• run out of → to use all of a resource
  collocations: time, money, ideas

You want to limit the amount of time for the daily meeting since it often overruns.
→ “Moving forwards, let’s time box the daily meeting to 30 minutes.”

The project is not finished but the deadline is tomorrow.
→ “We’re running out of time.”

TECH

Sprint Planning

The goal of a sprint planning meeting is to determine what tasks are going to be completed in the next 1-4 weeks.
It’s therefore really important to clearly explain what’s going to happen and when.

Consider this dialogue from a sprint planning meeting:

What English mistakes can you see?

3 common mistakes when talking about time:

Mistake 1: Using the present tense for future actions
“I focus on completing feature X” → I will focus on completing feature X
Rule: Use will or going to for future tense (Review rules)

Mistake 2: Mixing up 'by’ and ‘until’
"finished until Friday" → finished by Friday
Rule: Use ‘by’ for deadlines and ‘until’ for durations (More examples)

Mistake 3: Pronunciation of times
10:30 = ten thirty OR half past ten (NOT ten and thirty)
Rule: Saying the time can be complicated, and even different in British or American English (Learn more)

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