1:1 tracker

A preview of how this template lays out — the boards, their custom workflow states, and where the sample issues land. WIP caps show a badge.

• Career-growth conversation — next-level scope

  • growth
  P21pt

• Unblock the cross-team dependency they raised

  • action
  P12pt

• Feedback follow-up from last cycle

  P21pt

These rules aren't created when you apply the template — they're recipes you can wire up in Settings → Automations once your board exists.

• When

  A 1:1 produces action items

  Then

  Create follow-up issues assigned to the right owner

• When

  Day before a scheduled 1:1

  Then

  Surface the running agenda and any open action items

Agenda, Discussed, Action items, Following up, Closed. Notice what the board tracks: not the conversation, but the commitments that come out of it. That is deliberate, and it is also the boundary you must not cross — a 1:1 is a confidential conversation, and turning it into a monitored work item is how it becomes a status meeting nobody says anything real in. The columns after Discussed exist because the reason 1:1s lose credibility is almost never that they were badly run; it is that the thing the manager promised to unblock never moved.

1. 1.Keep a running agenda both people can add to

   The agenda accumulates between meetings rather than being invented in the first two minutes. Both people add to it, and the report's items come first — a 1:1 whose agenda is entirely the manager's is a status update with a friendlier name. Items that keep getting deferred are telling you something worth noticing.

2. 2.Protect a recurring slot and do not cancel it

   Cancelling a 1:1 sends a specific message regardless of the reason, and repeated cancellation is one of the most reliably demoralising things a manager does. Reschedule rather than skip. Consistency is most of the value: it is the standing guarantee that there is a place for a difficult topic, even in the weeks there is not one.

3. 3.Separate action items by owner

   Some commitments are the report's and some are the manager's, and the manager's are the ones that predict whether these meetings retain any credibility. Track them as real issues with dates. A manager who leaves three unblocking commitments outstanding for a month has taught their report that raising things here does not work.

4. 4.Give growth topics their own thread across months

   Career conversations do not fit into a weekly slot and get displaced by whatever is urgent, indefinitely. Keep them as a separate, long-lived thread and schedule a deliberate session periodically. This is also the record that makes a promotion case or a performance review something assembled from evidence rather than reconstructed from the last six weeks.

5. 5.Close the loop out loud

   When a follow-up completes, say so in the next meeting rather than letting it silently disappear. The visible pattern of raised, tracked and resolved is what makes the next difficult topic more likely to be raised. Closing items without acknowledgement gets you the bookkeeping without the trust.

This board encodes one opinion about how the work should run. Here is where that opinion is wrong and something else fits better.

• The board would be visible to anyone else. This is the disqualifier that matters most. 1:1 content is confidential between two people, and a workspace where colleagues, skip-levels or the wider team can read agenda items will produce sanitised agendas within a fortnight. If you cannot restrict it absolutely, use private notes instead.
• You would track anything performance-related here. Notes that could become evidence in a performance or disciplinary process belong in the HR system, with the access controls, retention rules and legal handling that context requires. Casual notes retained indefinitely on a project board are a genuine liability.
• The relationship needs repair, not process. If 1:1s are tense or avoided, structure will not fix it and may make it worse by adding surveillance to a strained conversation. That is a management problem to work on directly.
• You have two reports and a good memory. A shared document per person does everything this does with less machinery. The pipeline earns its place when you have enough reports that follow-ups genuinely slip.

Honest comparisons, including where the other tool wins. Planoda is pre-launch, so nothing below is a benchmark — it is a description of how each product approaches this job.

• Lattice and 15Five

  Performance platforms build 1:1s into the wider people process — shared agendas, goals, feedback, review cycles and engagement surveys in one place, with the privacy model designed for exactly this content. They also nudge both parties to prepare, which a board does not.

  Where Lattice and 15Five is better: The privacy and permission model is the decisive advantage: these tools are built on the assumption that this content is confidential, whereas a general work board is built on the assumption that it is not. If 1:1s connect to reviews and goals, use one.

• A shared document

  The most common setup in the world is one document per report, appended to each week, and it is genuinely good: both people can write in it, it holds context and long-form notes, and its history reads as a narrative of the relationship over time.

  Where A shared document is better: For the notes themselves and for a readable history across a year, a shared document is better than cards, and permissions on a single document are easy to reason about. Many good managers need nothing more.

• Notion

  A Notion database with a page per meeting and per report gives you the document experience plus some structure — templates for the agenda, properties for dates, and rollups across meetings. It sits between the plain document and a dedicated platform.

  Where Notion is better: The per-meeting template with a written history in one place is more comfortable to work in than a pipeline, and its granular page permissions handle the confidentiality problem better than most board tools.