A manager with six reports holds roughly 150 one-to-ones a year. Ask most of us what was said in any given one three weeks later and you get an impression, not a record.
Then review season arrives and a year of someone's work gets reconstructed from the last six weeks anyone can actually recall. That is how recency bias ends up inside a salary decision.
The four ways 1:1s decay
I have watched all of these happen on my own calendar:
- The status meeting. You already know what they are working on - it is in the tracker. If the 1:1 is a spoken version of the board, you are spending your most valuable half hour reading something you could have read in ninety seconds.
- The meeting with no memory. Good conversation, real problems, honest answers, and none of it written down. Three weeks later you cannot remember whether you promised to talk to the payments lead or they did.
- The meeting that keeps moving. Each cancellation is individually rational. The pattern is not, and your report is counting even if you are not.
- The meeting where nothing hard is ever said. Warm, pleasant, and slightly useless - because the hard feedback got saved for the review cycle, where it lands as a surprise.
What I built
A 9-tab spreadsheet and a 14-page playbook. Nothing clever, just a place for the record to live:
- 1-1 Log - 200 rows: their topics, your topics, feedback owed in both directions, what was decided, who owes what, and a 1-5 energy read that turns red on its own.
- Action Items - every promise made in a 1:1, with an owner and a self-calculating "days late" column. Filter by Owner = Me once a week and be honest about what you see.
- Growth Evidence - one line per observed thing, tagged to a competency and a scope. Promotion cases are not written in November; they are collected all year.
- Review Prep and Team Health - meetings held, last met, days since, open actions both ways, evidence count, average energy. All calculated, nothing typed.
- Question Bank - 60 questions sorted by the situation you are actually in: a new report, someone stuck, low energy, hard feedback, after a bad incident, someone clearly job-hunting.
The whole thing is three habits: ten minutes before each 1:1, five minutes after, ten minutes on Friday.
The one rule that makes it work
Write the log inside the meeting or within ten minutes of it. Not at the end of the day. Not on Friday. A 1:1 written up on Friday is a 1:1 you half-remember, which is where you started.
If you take notes in the room, say so once out loud: "I write these down so I don't drop things you asked me for." Nobody has ever objected to that sentence.
Where to get it
It works in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers. No macros, no add-ins, no account.
- Gumroad: https://logi2.gumroad.com/l/uurnfx (\$9)
- Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/4579037146/11-meeting-template-for-managers-one-on
I write up one of these tools a week - workbooks, playbooks, small things that solve one specific problem. If that is useful, the newsletter is free: https://aifounderweekly.substack.com
Also published on Medium.
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