A 1:1 note is a short message you send your manager before the meeting saying what you want out of it. Two or three items, one line each, sent early enough that they can read it before they sit down.
Without one, the meeting opens with "so, how are things" and you spend the first ten minutes rebuilding your week out loud. Both of you already knew most of it.
A recurring 1:1 with no note is your manager's meeting. You report, they steer, and the thing you actually wanted comes up in the last five minutes, if it comes up at all. The note is how you take half the wheel. It is the cheapest thing you can do to a meeting that repeats forever.
What goes in the note
Put in the items that need another person: something you cannot decide alone, something you cannot unblock alone, and something you want said out loud rather than carried around.
Pick from these and stop at three.
- A decision you need from them, with the two options you already narrowed it down to.
- A thing that is stuck, plus what you tried before bringing it over.
- Something you want them to know now, even if there is nothing to do about it yet.
- A question about priority, because they can see a queue you cannot.
Keep each item to one line. "Pricing page copy: ship the shorter version or wait for more feedback?" is a complete entry. The background lives in your head and comes out when they ask for it.
Order them by what you would be sorriest to leave unsaid. The meeting will run out of time, it always does, and whatever sits at the bottom of the list slides to next time, which in practice means the time after that.
If the item is a decision, ask for it in a way that makes yes or no easy. A decision dressed as an update gets answered with "nice, keep going".
Send it the day before, not five minutes before
Send the note the evening before or first thing that morning, so the answer can arrive with them instead of after them.
Managers usually need something you do not have. Sign-off from somewhere else, a number from another team, or the memory of what was promised in a meeting you were not in. Given a day, they can go and fetch it. Given five minutes, they read your note while you are talking and tell you they will look into it.
"I will look into it" is the sound of a meeting that did not happen.
The early send changes their side of the desk too. They walk in knowing what you care about, so the feedback you get is aimed at that thing instead of sprayed across your general performance. Aimed is more useful. It is also harder to sit through.
Write the item you keep not writing
The most useful line in the note is usually the one you type and delete.
You know the one. Scope that has crept past what you agreed to. A title that stopped matching the work months ago. The gap you started covering as a favor and now own without anyone saying so. It goes into the draft, it looks enormous sitting there in writing, and it gets swapped for "nothing major this week". Every time.
Name the topic. The full argument can wait for the room.
"I want to talk about how my scope has changed" is one line and it does the job. Put it on the table. Nobody is asking you to file a case with evidence attached. Say roughly what you want to happen, though, because a topic with no direction attracts sympathy rather than a change.
My own drafts of that line come out either apologetic enough to ignore or blunt enough to start a fight, and there is no version of me that gets it right at nine in the morning. So I fix it in the box before it leaves, with a rewrite from Unvent: the tone changes, the ask stays.
Put the hard line in the note rather than saving it for the last two minutes of the call. Saved for the end, it becomes an ambush, and nobody thinks well while being ambushed.
Leave out what your manager can already read
Leave out anything your manager can already read somewhere else.
- Status that is sitting in the tracker with your name on it.
- Full background for a decision, which they will ask for if they want it.
- Complaints about a person you have not spoken to yourself yet.
- A list long enough that reading it feels like homework.
The homework one matters more than it looks. A nine-bullet note gets skimmed, and a skimmed note is worse than no note, because you leave thinking the topic was raised and they leave remembering that something came up about pricing.
Routine status belongs in the update you already write. Spending your one hour of undivided attention on things that could have been read is a strange way to use a person.
If you run the 1:1, let the note change it
If you run the 1:1, ask for the note and then let it change the meeting.
People stop writing notes for exactly one reason: the note made no difference. They sent three lines, you opened with your own agenda anyway, and their second item never came up. Two rounds of that and the habit is dead.
So open with their list. Take the last item first now and then, since the bottom of a list is where the uncomfortable thing hides. Answer the decision inside the meeting if you can, and if you cannot, say the day you will answer by, which is the only honest alternative to answering.
When someone sends a note that says nothing, do not go and fix the note. Nobody writes "I want to talk about my scope" to a person who went vague on them the last two times. The empty note is the feedback. Read it that way and you will not enjoy it much.
Send the line you keep deleting
Unvent rewrites what you are typing, in place, in the tone you pick, so the awkward item makes it into the note instead of dying in your drafts. The version you send says the thing.
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