Your 1:1s Have No Ticket, So They're the First to Go

There are weeks where I finish my personal work after hours because I wouldn't move three meetings.

Thirty minutes each, one per person on my team. When the week goes bad, that block doesn't move, and something else pays for it.

Everybody agrees you should care about your people. It's easy advice to nod along with.

But when pressure starts to build, the first thing a tight deadline kills is the conversation that isn't about tickets.

What actually gets cut

When pressure is high and the delivery date is ugly, it's easy to throw a bunch of tickets at the team and yell march. That is not leading.

Support doesn't become impossible during crunch...it just stops being prioritized.

And it stops being prioritized for a fairly boring structural reason.

Most of what competes for that half hour leaves an artifact. A ticket closes. A PR merges. Something moves on a board, and at the end of the week you can point at it and say that thing happened. The 1:1 doesn't produce any of that. Nothing moves, nothing logs, and there's no line item anywhere that records the conversation took place, or what result that sync with your team member had.

The value it produces is uncountable in the same way. You can count the incidents you resolved. You can't count the person who didn't quietly check out, or the problem that surfaced in week two instead of week nine because there was somewhere for it to surface. The good outcome is an absence, and absences don't show up in any system you report on.

So the countable work wins by default. Not because anyone decided it should, and not because leadership is dumb about people. The scoreboard only has columns for one kind of thing.

Work that leaves an artifact tends to get protected by incentives, without anyone having to defend it. Work that doesn't leave one comes down to whether you decided it matters.

Encouragement, coaching, teaching, the non-ticketed work that actually develops people...all of it still fits in a chaotic period. There is room. But only if you've decided ahead of time that it isn't optional.

And "decided" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Good intentions don't survive crunch. A defended time slot does.

The practice

So here's the actual practice. At least 30 minutes a week with each person, and it happens regardless of what else is going on. I've been running it this way for months.

I prioritize that time over most other things on my calendar, because that's the only way to keep it from getting bumped every time I get busy.

I've had stretches where I was slammed, and the 30 minutes stayed put.

My team knows how busy I am. They can see it. That's the reason this matters more than it looks on paper. My hope is that watching me hold that half hour while everything else is on fire shows them something about how I prioritize them against the rest of the work.

The one rule about what we discuss

The one thing I push my team on is don't bring ticketed work to this conversation.

That half hour is not for discussing current work. It's set aside for growth, goals, whatever they're finding hard, things they want to learn, things they're curious about, advice they're after.

It's also your single best intelligence gathering tool as a manager. It's where you find out who's a flight risk, who's quietly drowning, who secretly hates the new project...before it blows up in front of you. A status update doesn't tell you any of that.

Get their agenda before the meeting

Before each 1:1, I send the person a document to jot down what they'd like to talk about. It's their agenda, not mine.

The document has three sections.

The first one is "anything you want to chat about," and it's blank space. Their call, sitting at the top of the page above anything I bring.

The second is five questions, under a heading that says they're just there to get you thinking. They're the nudge away from ticketed work. Some of the ones I use:

• What feels harder lately than it should?
• In your opinion, what matters most over the next 90 days?
• What has been your biggest win in the last week?
• What is one thing you would like me to do differently?

The third is follow ups, if there are any. Where something from a previous week gets picked back up.

That's the whole document. It's short, and it goes out before every one of these.

Then in the actual conversation, the hard part is shutting up. Don't jump to fix. Just absorb, and take notes on their friction points.

What it costs me

Back to the cost.

When I'm genuinely slammed, holding those 90 minutes means some of my other work gets delayed. On occasion that means finishing it after hours. I'm not going to pretend "protect the time" is free advice.

I don't have a clever way around that. The time comes from somewhere. I've decided where I want it to come from, and then I pay for it.

Why the slot is the thing

The structure is simple to write down. Thirty minutes, their agenda, a few questions, no tickets. Doing it well is a different thing entirely, and that part never stops being work.

The reason I keep coming back to the time slot rather than the technique is that the technique never gets a chance if the meeting doesn't happen. Running a good 1:1 is its own hard skill. But it's a skill that only comes into play in a conversation that actually took place.

So what matters first is whether any of it still happens during the quarter where everything's late and your own calendar has turned against you.

That's the week it counts. It's also the week it quietly disappears, unless you already decided it can't.

So what's the first thing your calendar drops when the pressure comes on? And what would it actually cost you to stop dropping it?