The 1-1 template I actually use every week

Most 1-1 templates you find online look like a meeting agenda from a consulting deck. Ten sections, colour coding, a place for the meeting owner, and a satisfaction score at the bottom.

I tried a few of them. They looked serious in Notion and died after two weeks, because filling them in took longer than the actual conversation.

What survived is much smaller. Four sections per person, two minutes of prep before the meeting, and a habit of writing three lines after.

The template

One page per report. The page stays the same for years and grows from the top down. New notes go at the top so I do not have to scroll to see what happened last time.

• About them. Partner or kids' names, background, what they are proud of, what they want next.
• Open threads. Career topics, frustrations, team dynamics, side interests we touched.
• Open loops. Anything I promised, anything they are waiting on, with a date next to it.
• Log. Three or four lines after each 1-1. Dated. What we talked about and what I noticed.

That is the whole template. No agenda field, no rating, no action items table. The log is where everything eventually lives, and the top three sections are what I re-read before we meet.

How I use it in practice

Two minutes before the 1-1, I open the page and read the top of the log plus the open loops. That is enough to walk in with a real first question instead of a generic one.

• How did the architecture review go on Thursday?
• You mentioned your mum was in hospital, is she home now?
• Did HR come back on the level change?

The person on the other side hears the same thing every time: the last conversation was not thrown away. That alone changes the tone of the meeting more than any framework I have read.

During the meeting I do not type. I make eye contact and listen. If something matters, I trust myself to remember it for another twenty minutes.

Right after, before I open Slack, I write three or four lines. What we talked about, what I promised, and anything I noticed about their mood or energy.

2026-05-27. Career talk. Wants to move toward platform work in the next 6 months. Feels stuck on product tickets. I said I would talk to R. about the platform rotation by next Friday.

That is a good entry. It captures the topic, the emotional colour, and the promise with a date. Reading it three weeks later is enough to pick up where we left off.

Why each section earns its place

About them is the section that saves you when life happens. Partner names, kids' ages, ongoing health things. You are not building a dossier, you are making sure you never have to ask twice about the surgery.

Open threads is where careers actually move. Most career conversations do not finish in one meeting. They stretch across months, and if you do not track the thread, you keep restarting it from zero.

Open loops is the trust section. Every time you say you will get back to someone, that promise lives here with a date. Once a week I scan the list and either close the item or send a real message about why it slipped.

The log is boring on purpose. It is not meant to be read end to end. It exists so that the top of the page always shows you what mattered last time, without asking your memory to do the work.

What is deliberately missing

There is no shared agenda field. Shared agendas sound great and mostly get filled in five minutes before the meeting by one person, which turns the 1-1 into a status update.

There is no action items table. Actions live inside the log or inside open loops, next to the person and the date. Splitting them into a separate table means you have two lists to maintain and you will maintain neither.

There is no mood rating. If I need a number to know how someone is doing, I have not been paying attention. The log tells me more than a score ever will.

The questions that fit this template

People often ask what to actually talk about in a 1-1. The template does not answer that, but it makes better questions possible because you are not starting cold.

• What is the most annoying thing about your week?
• What did you change your mind about this month?
• Where do you feel you are wasting time?
• What would you push back on if you thought I would not react badly?
• Is there a decision I made recently that did not make sense to you?

None of these questions is clever. They only work when the person believes the answer will not be forgotten by next week. That belief is what the template is really protecting.

If you want to try it

Make one page per person tomorrow. Copy the four sections. Fill in About them from memory, even if it is short. Leave the log empty and start writing after the next 1-1.

You will feel the difference within a month. Your reports will notice earlier than that, and they will not tell you why.