[npr11]

1. It's your meeting and you should write the agenda, not your manager. Usually this is 1-3 things you want to tell/discuss with him/her. It can help to keep note of important things that come up during work for you to discuss at the next 1-to-1.

2. Make sure your manager schedules more than 30 mins, ideally an hour. Prefer longer meetings to more frequent meetings, if that's a trade-off. It's important you can get into long or difficult topics. Often you won't need all the time, in which case you can always end the meeting early.

3. Focus on important topics, e.g. career development, rather than "updates", e.g. week done this week.

4. Avoid cancelling meetings; they're primarily for your productivity/happiness. How regularly you have 1-to-1s should depend on how experienced you are at the job and can change over time - probably somewhere between weekly and monthly. At the end of each meeting, try to arrange/confirm the time for the next one.

The book "High-output management" by Andy Grove has a great section on this, and I've found the advice there very helpful over the last few years.

[duxup]

Try to make sure everyone knows the adjenda ahead of time too if possible so everyone is prepared.