Catch up

Catch up

Now I’m going to show you how to use the English phrasal verb “catch up.” We did “catch up with ” in Lesson 321, so you can go back and listen to that one.

But “catch up” is extremely popular. We use this when we’re behind schedule, or when we have been delayed in achieving a goal. And we have to work extra hard to get back on track, to get back on schedule.

A few weeks ago, I migrated the whole website, PlainEnglish.com to a new hosting platform. This took a lot of time. And so during that week, I fell behind a little bit on creating and recording these lessons. So after the migration was successful, I had to catch up on lesson creation. I had to spend more time than usual creating new episodes, creating the slides for the videos, recording, all the stuff I do every week for all of you.

I found myself behind schedule. I had to catch up.

And it’s very, very common to use “catch up” in that way.

Here’s another example. What was today’s topic? Sleep? Imagine you’re a company selling mattresses. And you have a goal to sell 10,000 mattresses this year. July rolls around; you’ve sold 4,000. You’re in trouble. You’re behind. You’re halfway through the year, but you’ve only sold 40 percent of your goal. You need to catch up. You need to sell more in the second half of the year because you are behind.

How can you catch up? How can you increase your sales in the second half so that you reach your goal? Maybe you can catch up by planning some discounts, some specials, some extra marketing, some bonuses, whatever.

What are your plans this weekend? Can you come out with us on Saturday night? No, you might reply, I need to catch up on sleep.

Catch up on sleep! This is a super common expression, and it means, I’m feeling tired, I’m not feeling rested, I haven’t gotten the sleep I need this week, I need to get some extra sleep this weekend to make up for how far behind I am.

For a long time, the conventional wisdom was, you can’t catch up on sleep. If you don’t get enough during the week, you can’t just catch up over the weekend. And if you are missing an hour, two, three hours a night, then that’s true.

But we learned in today’s story that you can catch up on sleep …to a certain extent. You can sleep one or two hours extra if you need to catch up a little. This is not going to work if you have terrible sleep habits for five days and then sleep all weekend. You can only catch up a little. But a panel of sleep experts found that an hour or two a day on the weekends can help you catch up if you need it.

The examples I’ve given you have all been about necessities. Work, sleep, sales, these are things we need. But you can also use “catch up” if you find yourself behind on things that you want to do, but that you haven’t had enough time to do. The two examples I’ll give are TV shows and reading.

“I need to catch up on my reading.” That means, I usually like to read for a little bit every day, and I haven’t been able to do that lately, so tomorrow I’ll spend a couple of hours reading my book.

The other example I’ll give you is, “I need to catch up on my shows.” So, if a new season has come out and your friends are already on episode five or six, you’re stuck back on episode two, you need to catch up. You need to watch two or three at a time to get back on track.

So that’s “catch up.” Like many phrasal verbs, it has multiple definitions, but this one is really common. It means to work extra hard, or to do extra, to get back on schedule after a delay.

See you next time!

And that’s it; we have reached the end of Plain English once again. This was lesson 630, so you can find the full transcript of today’s lesson at PlainEnglish.com/630.

That is thanks to JR, the producer. And the transcripts, remember, have translations built-in for nine languages—Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, German, Turkish, and Polish. So if you speak one of those languages, you can see the translation of about 100 words and phrases per episode, right inside the transcript.

All that is at PlainEnglish.com/630. We’ll be back on Thursday. And we’ll be talking about a giant ball. See you then.