Owner: @Sam Corcos
Last Updated: 24 October 2020
We encourage everyone to do 1 on 1 meetings with the people you work closely with and we've found that adding some structure around these meetings substantially improves their effectiveness. The First Round Review has a good piece on running effective 1 on 1s, which we highly recommend reading.
Here are a few things we've found work well for us given our all-remote team and company culture. As always, these are best practices and not company directives, so use your judgment and manage your 1 on 1s in a way that works best for you.
We've found that it's helpful to keep a running Notion page for 1 on 1s ‣ in which we take notes on the topics discussed. Other than adding dates, there's not a lot of necessary structure to these documents, so you should do whatever works best for you.
See below for example from the 1 on 1 doc shared between @Sam Corcos and @Josh Clemente.
It's helpful to add these to the 1 on 1 doc at the top under a "Next" section, so you can discuss them in your next meeting.
During the course of a week, new things come up that you might want to talk over with one of your colleagues. If it's not urgent, the best way to handle this is to add it as an agenda item for the next call. Example below for the next 1 on 1 between @Josh Clemente and @Sam Corcos.
It's important to document action items and align on what those are during these meetings. If, as a result of a discussion, there is an action that needs to be taken, write it down and include the person to take the action.
Notion is equipped with an inline reminder tool which you can access at any time by typing “@Remind on XXX date”. Combining this with the @ function (see below), you can send reminders to anyone on the team via Notion Notifications, and keep track of their status with to-do boxes. More on Notion’s comments, mentions and reminders system
One thing that @Josh Clemente does is he tags himself in a comment whenever there is an action item that he's responsible for so that it sends him an email notification. He'll then use that email notification as a way to triage the task and to make sure he doesn't drop the ball.
