Why Google Docs Are Ruining Your 1-on-1s

Published April 11, 2026 · Updated July 19, 2026

Every engineering manager starts their career using a shared Google Doc for 1-on-1s. It's the obvious choice: zero setup, already in every company's toolchain, and easy to share with a new direct report on day one.

It also works, for a while. That's exactly what makes it a trap — the failure mode isn't a single bad decision, it's a slow accumulation that only becomes obvious once the document is unmanageable.

Here's specifically how that happens, and why the real-time, multiplayer nature of Docs makes it worse than a plain text file.

The Infinite Scroll Problem

By default, managers append each new meeting's notes to the top or bottom of the same file. There's no natural stopping point, so the document just keeps growing.

Six months in, referencing a conversation from March means scrolling — or Cmd+F and hoping you remember the right phrase. Every entry looks the same as every other entry: same font, same indentation, no visual signal for "this one mattered."

Engineers don't read infinite-scrolling text docs. They skim them, and then they stop opening them at all.

If getting to this week's agenda means scrolling past four months of history, the system has already failed — the document works against the exact behavior you want, which is opening it and immediately knowing what to talk about.

Comment Threads Compete With the Document Itself

Docs' real-time collaboration is genuinely useful for co-writing a spec. For a 1-on-1, it creates a second, parallel conversation that lives in the margins.

A developer leaves a comment on last week's note. You reply three days later. Someone else gets @mentioned into a thread that has nothing to do with the meeting itself. By the time you sit down for the next session, there's a backlog of unresolved comment threads sitting alongside the actual notes — and no way to tell, at a glance, which ones still need attention.

The document was supposed to be the single source of truth. Instead, the truth is split between the body text and however many comment threads happen to still be open.

One Doc Per Report Doesn't Scale

A manager with two direct reports can keep two documents straight. A manager with eight direct reports has eight growing, unstructured files scattered across a Drive folder, each with its own naming convention, its own comment backlog, and its own inconsistent structure depending on how rushed that particular week was.

There's no way to see, across the whole team, how many times "technical debt" or "unclear specs" came up this quarter. That information exists — buried across eight separate walls of text — but it isn't queryable. It's just paragraphs.

Burying the Action Items

A 1-on-1 without a clear outcome is a venting session with extra steps. In a Google Doc, action items are usually a bullet point at the bottom of a block of prose. When the call ends, the tab closes. By the following week, the promise to ping DevOps for access has quietly disappeared into the scroll.

The Fix: Structure Over Scroll

This is exactly the gap Accordia is built to close. Instead of one long document per report, each 1-on-1 is a structured, modular session:

• Visual agendas — drag-and-drop modules (Pulse Checks, checklists, discussion prompts) replace freeform paragraphs, so structure doesn't depend on the manager remembering to format consistently.
• Slideshow Mode — when the session starts, history disappears and both people focus on one topic at a time, with no comment sidebar competing for attention.
• Isolated action items — tasks are pulled out of the conversation into a dedicated, synced checklist instead of living as a bullet point at the bottom of a page.

Stop scrolling through paragraphs to find last week's context. Start with a system that surfaces it automatically.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't a shared Google Doc good enough for a small team?

It can work for a handful of direct reports and a few months of history. The problems tend to show up gradually as the document grows and scanning becomes slower.

How is this different from just organizing the doc better with headings?

Headings help with skimming, but they don't fix the underlying issue: a text document has no concept of a task, a status, or a structured question.

What about Google Docs' comment and suggestion features?

Comments are useful for async review, but they scatter a live conversation across margin threads instead of keeping it in the flow of the meeting.

Do I need to migrate my existing Google Docs 1-on-1 notes to switch tools?

No — existing docs can stay as a read-only archive. You can start your next 1-on-1 in a structured tool without converting anything first.

Related Guides

• Accordia vs. Google Docs — a direct side-by-side, including where "shared" quietly stops meaning two-way.
• Why Microsoft Word is Ruining Your 1-on-1s — the same underlying failure, different document tool.
• How to Track Action Items Effectively — fixing the "action item graveyard" specifically.
• 1-on-1 Meeting Templates — structured agendas you can use instead of a blank doc.