One-on-one notes for each person you manage, week after week

One on one meeting notes are what a manager keeps from each regular conversation with someone on their team: what that person brought up, what you agreed, and what is still open for next time. With several reports, the hard part is keeping each person’s thread apart from week to week. Dalm, a Mac app, records the conversation without joining the call. It recognises the speech on your Mac and sends no audio anywhere; the transcript is synced to our servers automatically, and a language model writes the summary, with what was decided and what is still open. There is a Free plan.

What a manager needs to keep between one-on-ones

One one-on-one is easy to hold in your head. Six a week are not. By the third week you are trying to recall who asked for what, which promise was yours, and whether the thing someone brought up quietly a month ago ever came back. Good notes answer three questions for each person separately: what did they bring up, what did we agree and who owns it, and what is still open. They also have to be fair to the person: a line you keep about someone should be something they actually said, not how you happen to recall it. The outline for a single conversation is on the one-on-one meeting template; this page is about the thread across many of them. If you coach people who do not report to you, the page for coaches is about keeping each client’s thread.

The conversations with your reports, and what you get after each

Dalm works out from the conversation what kind of meeting it was and shows it at the top of the meeting. For the conversations a manager has with their people, this is what each one leaves you with:

The conversation	What you get after it	What it is for
A one-on-one with someone who reports to you	A one-screen summary, and a list of who does what by when	A quick look before the next one-on-one, and your side and theirs of what was agreed
A performance review	A one-screen summary, and a write-up laid out for a performance review	A draft to check against what the person actually said before any of it goes into their review

Each of them also leaves the transcript, with who spoke when, and a summary in which every point keeps the words it came from. The summary appears by itself once the transcript is ready; documents are a click away. The kind of meeting is not yours to pick or change, and when the app is unsure, the conversation is filed as a general meeting. If you want your own write-up after each one-on-one, describe it once as a template of your own — and know that the box which builds it for each new meeting applies to all your meetings, the team meeting included.

On a call or across the desk

On a video call your microphone is you and the call’s sound is the other person, so their words and yours are apart from the first line. Across a desk, the voices are told apart on your Mac, and the transcript made from them is synced to our servers. Each voice carries the app’s suggested name, or a speaker number, until you confirm who is who. For the call itself, recording a Zoom meeting walks through it step by step.

What is still open from last week

One-on-ones repeat, and Dalm treats them as a series. A point left open can come back in the next conversation, marked “Open since …” with its date, so a promise from three weeks ago is in front of you instead of in an old notebook. If a point should stop following you, choose “Do not carry over”. When the app only thinks a conversation continues an earlier one, the point is flagged “Possibly a continuation” — check it, because a point carried into the wrong conversation hands one person someone else’s task.

A manager’s one-on-ones with different people count as one series, so a point left open with one person can be offered in the next conversation with someone else. It is carried over only when the app judges it came up again; otherwise it shows as “Possibly a continuation”. With several reports, look at every carried-over point before you share the notes.

Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. So before a line about someone goes into a review or a message to them, you can read what they actually said around it; where something was not said, the summary leaves it empty. Across your meetings, the Tasks list gathers action items by due date, and the meeting list can be filtered by person and by kind of meeting.

Your own lines, and what was said just before them

During the conversation you can type short lines of your own — a name, a number, “follow up on the rota”. Each line keeps the moment you wrote it, and under it Dalm shows what was being said just before, taken straight from the transcript rather than written by the model; you can hide it. Your lines also steer the summary: it is built around what you chose to write down, not a retelling of the whole hour. One thing to know: searching your meetings looks through transcripts and documents, but not your own notes. When one-on-ones sit between other calls all day, back-to-back meetings has the rest.

Who else on the team sees a recorded one-on-one

In a team workspace a meeting is seen by the whole team by default. A one-to-one can be set to elevated privacy, seen by the owner, the administrators and an access list, or to protected privacy, seen only by the meeting’s owner and the access list. The app is the one that decides what kind of meeting it was — you cannot mark a conversation yourself — so this covers only the conversations it recognises that way.

If the app is not sure a conversation was a one-to-one, it keeps it from them all the same. The person you met with sees the meeting only if you invite them to it.

If you want the person to have the notes, send them yourself: edit any line first, then copy the summary, pass it on through Share, or save it as Word or PDF. How roles work in a team is on the team page.

What leaves your Mac after a one-on-one

The conversation is heard on your Mac: speech is recognised there and the audio is never sent anywhere. The audio is deleted once the text exists. What travels is text. The transcript, the lines you typed and the names you gave are synced to our servers automatically, and no setting turns that off. A language model run by a third party reads them to write the summary, any document you ask for, and answers to your questions. Piece by piece, it is all on privacy.

When recording your one-on-ones is the wrong call

• When the person has not agreed to it, or the talk turns to health, family or a disciplinary matter. Dalm does not announce itself, so telling them is up to you, and the rules on recording consent differ by place. Cancel the recording — it is discarded at once — and keep notes by hand.
• When your company does not allow such conversations to be stored outside it, even as text. The transcript is synced to our servers and read by a language model.
• When you want to listen again. The audio is gone once the text exists.
• When you want one answer across months of one-on-ones. You ask about one meeting at a time; across meetings there are the Tasks and Decisions lists, and search.
• When the one-on-one happens on a phone or on Windows. Dalm is for Mac; a recording made elsewhere comes in as a file. A check-in under 100 words is not counted as a meeting at all.

Free for your own one-on-ones, Team when managers share a format

Recording one-on-ones, the transcripts and the summaries come with the Free plan, and Free is a plan rather than a trial. Dalm needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and an account; while it is not public, the way in is the waitlist. In a Team workspace the templates, the dictionary and the tags are shared, so a format one manager describes is there for the others too. What the paid plans add is on the pricing page.