Yes, you need 1:1 meetings, and skipping them is quietly costing you retention, productivity, and trust. Lia walks through the Roses, Buds, Thorns framework and a highlights/lowlights structure you can run in as little as 10 minutes. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel too busy to add another standing meeting.
This episode is part of the 1:1s, Meetings & Time Management series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…just looking at your calendar before Monday morning goes a long way.”
“…these are the meetings where you are the approver or decision maker, and they are also your one-on-ones with your team members.”
“…you really wanna set them up for success, making sure they’re clear on what this meeting is about so that they really can step up and be a leader.”
“Now you enter the week seeing, okay, this is exactly how I can spend my time.”
Episode highlights
Why the Sunday Scaries hit managers twice as hard
Most people dread Sunday evenings. For managers, that dread doubles because you are not just thinking about your own workload. You are also mentally carrying everything your team has coming at them. Lia’s fix is not a mindset reframe. It is a concrete 10-minute calendar audit you run every Sunday night before the week begins.
Bucket one: meetings you must keep
The first category is non-negotiable. These are meetings where you are the approver or decision maker, and every single one-on-one with your team members. Lia is direct about the one-on-ones: do not move them around just because your calendar feels packed. For some team members, that standing check-in is the moment they have been waiting for all week. Keeping it is a signal that they matter.
Bucket two: meetings you can delegate
This is where managers often leave opportunity sitting on the table. Plenty of recurring meetings do not actually require the manager in the room. When you identify those, delegate them out, and spread the opportunities across a few different people so more than one person gets a chance to step up as a leader.
Delegating a meeting is not just forwarding a calendar invite. Lia recommends setting clear context: here is how this meeting runs, here is your role in it, here is how I need you to communicate what comes out of it. Check that the person has the bandwidth, and if they are stretched, have a trade-off conversation before the handoff.
Bucket three: meetings that never needed to happen
Every calendar has them. These are the meetings everyone shows up to wondering why they are there, but nobody cancels because they are not the owner or because something occasionally useful comes up. This bucket is where Lia pushes managers to ask harder questions: Could this be monthly instead of weekly? Could it move to Slack or a shared doc? Is the only real value the social connection, in which case a team lunch or coffee chat would do the job better?
The audit has to happen every week. Let it slide and the meeting pile snowballs fast.
What changes when you finish the audit
Once you have sorted your calendar into those three buckets, you enter Monday with a completely different energy. You know exactly where your time is going, who is driving which pieces of work, and where your actual focus blocks are. Even if you end up changing nothing, simply looking at the week before Monday morning arrives removes a significant amount of dread. You are no longer blindsided. You have a handle on it.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 182: Still drowning in meetings? How to reclaim 5 or more hours every week as a manager. Most managers lose hours every week because they hold on tighter when they should be letting go. Lia walks through four concrete strategies, from stepping out of meetings and delegating with context to managing your own stress signals and naming the real cut line on your priority list. This episode is most useful for managers who feel perpetually behind and are unknowingly passing that stress straight down to their teams.
- Ep 159: Why your to-do list never gets done (and how to fix it with smarter calendar design). The real reason your week feels like a hamster wheel is context switching, not a lack of effort. Lia walks through three practical calendar moves, grouping similar meetings, planning your week in advance, and color-coding by context, that dramatically cut the mental cost of jumping between tasks. This episode is especially useful for leaders who feel perpetually behind despite working hard.
- Ep 127: How to save 5 to 10 hours a week as a leader (without burning out your team). Leaders lose hours every week to bloated meetings, manual processes, and context they never hand off. Lia walks through a repeatable system, calendar audits, meeting hygiene, process simplification, and intentional delegation, that can reclaim 5 to 10 hours a week for you and up to 30 to 40 hours a month across your team. This episode is especially useful for founders and corporate leaders whose teams have started to notice the overwhelm before they did.
- Ep 89: Why you need 1:1 meetings with every team member (and how to run them well). Yes, you need 1:1 meetings, and skipping them is quietly costing you retention, productivity, and trust. Lia walks through the Roses, Buds, Thorns framework and a highlights/lowlights structure you can run in as little as 10 minutes. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel too busy to add another standing meeting.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Now you enter the week seeing, okay, this is exactly how I can spend my time. Now I have a lot clearer around what I’m gonna be doing, who’s kind of driving what piece, and the work blocks that I can have. And this is gonna give you so much more ease entering the week. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. Where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips. Or a seasoned manager looking up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Happy Sunday and because it’s Sunday. This is our new series called Sunday Scaries, where I am gonna be talking about those things that often creep in either for some of us, I think around 1:00 PM on a Sunday after we’ve kind of gone through the weekend and we start thinking.
For me it was like 4:00 AM Saturday morning. So like very, very shortly after the regular week ended when I started thinking about all the stuff I have to do the next week. So whatever time your Sunday scaries begins, you’re not alone. And we are every week gonna talk about one thing that you can do to take some of that pressure off your week, the following week. And if you wanna get my manager tip of the week and be the first to know about any new content I have coming your way, or to get special offers just for my community, send me the text managers to (415)234-5716.
This goes right to me, so it’s a great place to ask any questions if you’re getting stuck or to submit your questions for my Ask Me Anything episodes. Again, that was text managers to (415)234-5716. The first Sunday scary that I wanna dive into is this feeling of, oh my God, I have so much to do. Next week. I got my meetings and my approvals and my work and my team’s coming to me. And this overwhelm that starts to creep.
So my one tip every Sunday night is to take a look at your calendar and start getting a lot more diligent with how you’re spending your time. You’re gonna look across all of your meetings and you’re gonna break them into three buckets. First bucket is those meetings that you absolutely have to be at. So these are the meetings where you are the approver or decision maker, and they are also your one-on-ones with your team members. Now I, I talk about this in an upcoming interview with the amazing Carrie Jacobs about the importance of keeping your one-on-ones.
And these are not meetings that you wanna be shifting all around because this is the one time your team members get to talk to you. Sometimes this might be the moment they’ve been waiting for all week and we’re diligent with our calendars. It doesn’t mean getting rid of those one-on-ones. Bucket. One, keep your one-on-ones with your team members in the meetings where you have to review or approve something. Okay? That’s the. Second bucket, this is the meetings that you can delegate to a team member.
These are the opportunities for you to have other people step up as leaders. When you go through this category, you wanna think about how can I distribute these meetings that I’m delegating across my team so that you give a few different people opportunities to step up. And then as you’re delegating, setting the context, it’s totally, you know, it’s appropriate and necessary to set expectations as you’re delegating, saying to a. Hey, I’d like for you to take this one on.
Here’s how this meeting is run. Here’s gonna be your role in it. Here’s the expectations. Here’s how we need to communicate. What comes outta that meeting, and whatever you need to do to have confidence that you get what you need and that person is set up for success. You know, I think when we’re delegating meetings, we wanna talk about making sure that that person has bandwidth to take that on. And if they’re say, you know, I have all these other things and.
You talk about trade-offs to make sure there’s space for that, but you really wanna set them up for success, making sure they’re clear on what this meeting is about so that they really can step up and be a leader. That’s that second bucket. Delegating to team members and delegating across a few different team members. So you get a few people the opportunity to be leaders. Third bucket is the meetings that never had to be meetings. And we all know there’s more of these than we’re giving credit for.
There are a lot of meetings that we have in our week, in our month, in our year that sort of just to kind of pile on and we go to it and we’re like, why are we in this meeting? But we don’t cancel it because we’re not the meeting owner. Or sometimes there’s something interesting that comes up. These are the meetings that we wanna be reducing for ourselves and for our. As you do this audit every week, and it’s important to do every week because when we let too much time pass, this thing starts to snowball anyway, and when we find this kind of meeting, it’s an opportunity to ask ourselves, is this a weekly thing that could be a monthly thing or quarterly?
Is this a meeting that is just old and kind of like we’re just meeting it to get together? Is this something that maybe we can move to a group chat or group text or a slack? Is this a meeting that actually could be resolved through a Google Doc or an email? Or is this actually we’re needing people to come together? Maybe informally. So this could be replaced with maybe like a monthly team lunch or, or team happy hour team breakfast or coffee chat or something like that.
Figure out what that last bucket where it feels like, well, there’s not really decisions or forward progress, but there was something about this meeting that that had a little bit of value, figuring out what that is and then moving it to the appropriate. Now when you’ve done these three steps, paring down to just the meetings that were, you’re the approver or just your one-on-one through your team members. Two, what you can delegate in three, what you can actually take off the calendar fully.
Now you enter the week seeing, okay, this is exactly how I can spend my time. Now I have a lot clearer around what I’m gonna be doing, who’s kind of driving what piece? and the work blocks that I can have, and this is gonna give you so much more ease entering the week. Not only that, even if you change nothing, just looking at your calendar before Monday morning goes a long way. I know there’s a lot, you know, maybe you don’t want to even open your computer on the weekend or look at your work phone on the weekend.
I get it. But I have found this to be so helpful for removing that stress and that Sunday scaries, when I look at, okay, I got a handle on the week. I know it’s coming. I know what to. Give it a try. That is our first Sunday scaries. My goal with this series is to start to reduce some of those Sunday scaries. Again, if you were like me thinking of all the work stuff, really, you know, Saturday, middle of the night, then hopefully that gets you at least till the Sunday at one o’clock crowd and give it a try.
So if you’re feeling stuck, if you’re feeling, ugh, like some of this work, some of this doesn’t, I, I still feel kind of like I need some more. Go to my quiz, liagarvin.com/manager quiz and just share where you’re getting stuck and I will send you a personalized video with a few recommendations for your team. Again, that’s liagarvin.com/manager quiz all one word share where you’re getting stuck, and I will send you that personalized video talking through a couple ideas to try on your team.
Hopefully. With that, you can enjoy the rest of your Sunday and start the week strong. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn.
See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I stop dreading Monday and feeling overwhelmed on Sunday nights?
The fix is simple: open your calendar on Sunday night and do a quick audit before the week starts. Even if you change nothing, just looking at what is coming goes a long way toward reducing that overwhelmed feeling. When you can see exactly how your time is laid out, who is driving what, and where your work blocks are, you enter Monday with clarity instead of dread. You don't have to solve everything, you just need to feel like you have a handle on the week.
What is the three-bucket method for auditing your calendar as a manager?
Sort every meeting into three buckets. Bucket one is meetings you must attend, meaning you are the approver or decision maker, plus your one-on-ones with your team members. Bucket two is meetings you can delegate to a team member, spreading those across a few different people so more than one person gets a chance to lead. Bucket three is meetings that never needed to be meetings at all, things that could move to a Slack channel, a Google Doc, an email, or a monthly team lunch instead.
Which meetings should a team leader never cancel or reschedule?
Never move your one-on-ones with your team members around just to clean up your calendar. That one-on-one might be the moment a team member has been waiting for all week. It is the one guaranteed time they get to talk directly to you, so protecting it matters. When you are auditing your calendar and looking for things to cut or delegate, keep your one-on-ones and the meetings where you are the actual approver or decision maker in place.
How do I delegate meetings without setting my team member up to fail?
Before handing a meeting off, set clear context. Tell the team member how the meeting is typically run, what their role in it will be, what the expectations are, and how to communicate what comes out of it. Also check that they actually have the bandwidth to take it on. If they are stretched, talk through trade-offs to make space. The goal is for that person to step in feeling confident and ready to lead, not just to get a meeting off your plate.
How often should a manager do a calendar audit to stay on top of meeting overload?
Do it every single week. Waiting too long lets unnecessary meetings pile up and snowball until the problem feels unmanageable. A weekly Sunday night audit keeps things from creeping back up. As you review, ask whether recurring meetings could shift from weekly to monthly, whether a meeting has simply outlived its purpose, or whether what you are meeting about could be handled through a shared doc, a group chat, or even a casual team breakfast instead.