Circle back meaning: we'll talk about it later

The most hated phrase at work

Circle back keeps coming first when people rank the office phrases they hate most.

How often it’s written

In 1,000,967 real emails, “circle back” appears 533 times, about six times as often as per my last email. That’s roughly one email in 1,900.

Circle back meaning in a meeting

“Let’s circle back on that” puts a topic off until later. People say it when the hour is up, or when nobody wants to say no in front of the whole room. The dictionary meaning is “to return”. Many people hear a cliché in it, or something passive-aggressive.

Circle back on a hard question

Circle back works best on a question with no good answer. Someone asks the trainer whether the anonymous survey is anonymous at all. The trainer calls it a very valid point and promises to circle back. Then the next slide goes up.

Circling back in an email

“Just circling back on this” is the polite follow-up to an email nobody answered. Send it three times, a week apart, and you have a paper trail.

“Following up on my note from the 3rd” does the same job without the cliché.

The circle that never closes

Without a date, nobody has to come back to the topic, so decisions go missing. Ask for a raise at a company that likes to say we’re a family here, and “let’s circle back” can be the last you hear of it.

Circle back is a politer way of putting something on the back burner. To close the circle, give it a date: “Sure, let’s take it at Thursday’s standup.”

If the same topic comes back every week, give it its own slot on a regular cadence.

A follow-up email with circle back in it

Subject: Re: Office move, parking permits

Hi Jen, circling back chasing you again on the parking permits from the 3rd. The movers arrive Monday at 7, and the parking office wants names by Friday noon. If it’s easier, reply with just the list.

From a loop to the meeting room

Literally, to circle back is to loop around to where you started. The oldest example a dictionary gives for the meeting-room sense is from CNN, on August 17, 2018.

In Got a Minute?, the office card game, Circle back is a card that reverses the turn order and ends your turn without drawing. That’s about as far as the phrase ever takes anything.