You’ve got a recurring 1:1 with your manager every Tuesday at 10am. You’ve also got a recurring 1:1 with a direct report every Thursday at 2pm. Both of them are fine. Not bad. Just fine — you’re both staring at your screens, maybe a shared doc is open, and by the end of the 30 minutes you’ve covered what needed to get covered and you both go back to what you were doing.
Somewhere in your calendar is an unused movement slot. It’s been there every week. You just haven’t converted it yet.
What You’ve Been Doing Instead
The default for 1:1 meetings is video call or conference room, which means you are sitting — either at your desk or in a slightly different chair than your desk. For a 30-minute meeting, you add 30 minutes to your already-substantial sitting total. For a 1-hour 1:1, it’s worse.
When people look for ways to get more movement into their day, they almost always look outside the workday: walk before work, go to the gym after work, do a lunchtime run. These all require carving time out of something else. A walking 1:1 doesn’t carve anything out of anything. It replaces a slot that already exists with a better version of itself.
There’s a secondary reason this matters beyond daily step count. Most knowledge workers have somewhere between 3 and 6 hours of genuinely high-quality cognitive output in them per day. Sitting in a chair staring at screens for 8+ hours doesn’t change that ceiling — it just fills the remaining hours with lower-quality work that feels productive. Brief movement breaks, including walking meetings, are one of the few interruptions that tend to improve the quality of what comes after them rather than just delaying it.
There’s also a performance argument, not just a movement one. About ten years ago I converted my weekly 1:1 with a senior manager to a walking meeting — not for health reasons, but because we were both bored of the video call format. The change was immediate and strange. We covered the same agenda items faster. The conversation went off-script in better ways. Silences felt comfortable instead of awkward. I couldn’t fully explain it at the time.
It turns out there’s a reason.
The Creative Side Effect
In 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition with an almost absurdly clean finding: walking increases creative output by a substantial margin. Across four experiments with 176 participants, walking boosted performance on divergent thinking tests (the kind where you generate multiple uses for a single object) in 81% of cases compared to sitting. Indoors on a treadmill, outdoors on a path — the effect held either way. It wasn’t the environment doing it. It was the walking.
Even more useful for the meeting context: the creative boost persisted after sitting back down. So a walking 1:1 that ends when you get back to your desk still has residual effect on the thinking you do next.
This is the reason the walking 1:1 isn’t just a movement hack — it changes the quality of what happens in the meeting. The kind of conversations that benefit from divergent thinking: brainstorming, career conversations, working through a sticky problem, pressure-testing a strategy. Basically all the things that 1:1 meetings are actually for, as opposed to status updates that could have been an email.
The convergent thinking piece is worth noting honestly: the same study found that walking didn’t improve focused analytical tasks — connecting dots, finding the single right answer. If your 1:1 is mostly reviewing numbers or making a specific decision, the walking format is slightly less of an advantage. For everything else, it’s better than sitting.
There’s also something interpersonal happening in a walking meeting that’s harder to quantify. Side-by-side movement changes the conversational dynamic compared to face-to-face sitting. The absence of eye contact as the default creates a different kind of psychological safety — things get said on walks that don’t get said in conference rooms. Career conversations, honest feedback, admissions that something isn’t working — these travel better when you’re both looking ahead instead of at each other. It’s not an accident that a lot of people describe their most meaningful 1:1 conversations as ones that happened while walking.
How to Actually Suggest It
The slight awkwardness most people feel is: “what if they say no, or think it’s weird?” In practice, almost nobody says no. But the framing matters.
Don’t send a calendar invite that just changes the location to “outside.” Say something first.
Here’s one version that works: “Hey — I’ve been trying to get more movement in during the day and I wondered if you’d be up for making our Thursday 1:1 a walking meeting sometimes. We could just walk around the block or the parking lot. No pressure if that doesn’t work for you.”
A few things that version does right: it explains your reason (not just “I had a weird idea”), it specifies low logistics (“around the block”), and it genuinely makes it easy to decline without weirdness.
If you’re remote and this is a video meeting, it still works: “I’ve been trying to walk during meetings — would you be up if we both just walk and use phones instead of cameras this week?” A lot of people find this is actually a relief. Not having to look presentable for a 30-minute call is its own small gift.
For manager 1:1s versus peer 1:1s versus direct-report 1:1s, the direction of authority doesn’t change much. A manager suggesting it to a report is easy. A report suggesting it to a manager is fine as long as you give them the easy out — which the phrasing above does. Peer to peer is the easiest of all.
A note on what to do with your phone during a walking meeting: use it for the call if you’re remote, obviously. If you’re in person, leave it in your pocket. The meeting is already moving in the right direction; checking Slack while walking alongside someone is a fast way to undo the entire benefit and make them feel like the meeting isn’t worth the format change.
Also: you don’t have to do this every week. “Sometimes” is in the phrasing above for a reason. Some weeks the weather is bad, some weeks someone has a bad knee, some weeks you just need to share your screen. The walking meeting is a tool, not a policy. One a week is plenty. Two is ambitious. You’re not trying to eliminate sitting — you’re trying to convert one meeting that was always going to happen anyway.
Tonight’s action: Look at your calendar and find one recurring 1:1 this week. It can be the one that feels the most routine, the one where you both already know what you’re going to say. Before you sleep tonight, write the message you’ll send tomorrow morning to suggest the switch. You don’t have to send it tonight. Just write it so it exists.
If you want more movement without any additional time blocks, short workouts after work covers what actually survives a real Tuesday evening. And if you’re coming back from a longer stretch of not moving at all, starting to exercise again after years off is a gentler on-ramp before you start redesigning your calendar.
The 1:1 you already have on your calendar is the movement slot you’ve been looking for. It’s just been disguised as a meeting.