When I wrote The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones, I felt like my one-on-ones mostly involved doing generic stuff that anyone who cared a lot could do. So I was surprised when someone on Hacker News left this gem of a comment: I’ve had a thousand+ 1x1s with countless people (both as a manager and as a report), and the majority of them are just time sucking status updates, casual meet and greets, or some performance/process related discussion.