I do not like using the word "impact" in work settings.

It sounds positive when we say things like "impact showcase," "impact recognition," or "25 years of impact." It sounds serious when we say "impactful work." But the same word is also used for layoffs ("10,000 employees were impacted"), outages ("10,000 homes were impacted"), and literal collisions ("meteor impact"). One word tries to cover progress, damage, and force.

That is the problem for me. The word is too overloaded.

Two people can use "impact" in the same meeting and mean opposite things. One person means value created. Another means harm done. Everyone hears the same word, but not the same meaning.

And it shows up everywhere. Product updates say "high-impact feature." Compliance memos say "impacted regions." Incident calls say "customer impact." Performance templates ask for "impact statements." We keep using one label for wins, losses, and side effects, then wonder why conversations drift.

I think that confusion matters because language shapes focus.

When teams review every six months, "impact" often becomes a short-term scoreboard. But what if your horizon is years? Many accomplishments compound slowly and only become obvious later. Early learning, foundational design, and system cleanup can look quiet for a long time before they create a hockey-stick curve.

If you are shaping metal, a hammer blow can move it, but heat and pressure matter just as much. Sometimes precision tools leave a clearer mark with less force. Sometimes you leave a major mark with almost no collision at all. A bigger hit is not always a better result.

Work is similar. The loudest move is not always the best move. Brute force is not always progress. A clean system, a better process, or good timing can produce stronger results with less disruption.

This is also why outage language sounds off to me. We say things like "we do not want to impact the team with an outage." But the real goal is reliability, trust, and recovery speed. "Impact" blurs the real engineering target.

I also think "impact" is the wrong word for celebrating accomplishments. We should celebrate behaviors and systems that repeatedly produce good outcomes, not a vague label. Growth is often logarithmic. It starts slow, then accelerates. If we only look for immediate force, we miss compounding progress.

Take learning as an example. Learning can look like zero immediate effect until it gets applied. Then suddenly it changes execution quality, decision speed, and team leverage. Calling only the final visible moment "impact" misses most of the real work.

And consider Benjamin Franklin's long run of failed experiments before breakthrough discoveries. Were those failures "not impactful" because they did not produce immediate visible results? I would say they were essential steps in a larger arc of accomplishment.

There is another ambiguity problem: prevention work. Teams often give more credit to the person who fixes a visible failure than to the person who prevented the failure in the first place. We praise the dramatic rescue, even if someone else quietly prevented ten similar incidents. In plain business terms, there should be no difference between making money and saving money. But "impact" language often favors visible events over prevention behaviors and prevention systems.

The same issue appears in "moving the needle." Yes, you can strike a needle and make it move for a moment. But what system keeps positive movement stable, measured, and sustained? If there is no monitoring and no reinforcement, that movement will drift back. The system that preserves gains matters more than the momentary move.

To me, "impact" feels bumpy (like square wheels). You still move, but every turn is noisy. I would rather use language that feels more like round wheels: steady, clear, and directional.

I would rather say:

• accomplishments
• outcomes
• goals reached
• value delivered
• problems solved

These words tell me what actually happened.

If I had to keep the word, I would reserve it for narrow cases (for example, a formal six-month performance review rubric where terms are predefined and everyone agrees on the same meaning). Outside of that, I think it hurts clarity more than it helps.

This post title is also a small homage to Edsger Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful." Not because "impact" is syntactically illegal (the compiler still accepts it), but because in normal conversation it jumps control flow straight past precision.

The impact of using impact to both mean positive and negative movement of the needle is negative (and that is exactly why the word feels unhelpful in the first place).

Related reading: Context Hunting vs Context Gathering, Effort Tracking vs Task Tracking, and Why I Love Worklogs.