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Business English vocabulary · Office Idioms and Phrases

Boil the ocean

Meaning in business english, with examples

idiomAdvanced term

In business english, boil the ocean means: To try to solve an unrealistically large problem or do too much at once.

In Turkish: gerçekçi olmayacak kadar kapsamlı işe girişmek

How it is used

Informal criticism of excessive scope. Explain which narrower task matters instead of using the idiom as an unexplained dismissal.

Example sentences

  1. We do not need to boil the ocean; start by fixing the three forms customers use most.

    The speaker narrows an unmanageable task to a useful first step.

  2. Trying to boil the ocean delayed our report because the team kept adding unrelated markets.

    Scope expansion prevents the original report from being finished.

Common collocations

  • try to boil the ocean
  • avoid trying to boil the ocean
  • bandwidthIn office talk, the time, energy or capacity that a person or team has available to take on more work.
  • workloadThe amount of work that a person or a team has to do in a given period of time.

More terms: Office Idioms and Phrases

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