Writing great check-ins, fast

Intentions, not tasks

Avoid listing small tasks in Steady. (Steady can pull in data from Jira, Asana, or Github issues anyway.)

Instead of tasks, think in terms of intentions. Intentions have the impact in mind. They define meaningful progress for your team and project. They also are the most effective way to communicate to others what you're working towards, increasing trust and delivery confidence.

Keep it brief

You need to put some thought into your check-ins, but each update shouldn't take more than two minutes. Communicate just enough information to keep your team updated on your progress. Ask yourself, "What should others know that they can't see from my activity?" And don't be afraid to add a little personality and write things that people will want to read.

Using blockers

"Blockers" are issues that prevent you from moving forward and require someone other than yourself to fix. Only fill in blockers when you want someone else to intervene on your behalf. Your Team Lead will be notified when you enter a blocker and you can use @mentions to notify other team members.

Quick Fill

Quick Fill makes it easier and faster to check in and post updates. It works by summarizing activities Steady knows about, like pull requests and issue updates, so you can focus on figuring out what the next best thing to work on is. It combines your previous intentions with integration activity and generates a complete answer, which you can then edit.

Quick fill currently summarizes activity and PR/MR descriptions from:

Github Pull Requests
Gitlab Merge Requests
Steady’s Live Goals
Jira issues
Linear issues
Asana issues

You can disable Quick Fill in your Preferences section by toggling Quick Fill off.

Autocomplete

Use auto-complete to insert links to items from your connected integrations in your check-ins and comments.

Simply type # and a string of text that is part of your item, and you'll see the available options. Select one, and we'll auto-insert a link to the item.

Formatting check-ins

Steady's rich text editor makes it easy to customize your check-ins and comments.

When you highlight text, a contextual toolbar will appear that gives you access to formatting options, including bold, italic, strikethrough, links, bulleted lists, quotes, and code blocks.

Images & Attachments

Images and attachments can be inserted using the paperclip icon in the lower-right-hand corner of the field. Images and gifs can also be inserted by pasting them directly in.

Emoji

Insert emoji into your check-in by typing : A menu with available emoji will pop up to select from.

Links

Links can be inserted through the toolbar or simply by highlighting the text you want to link and pasting the URL. The text will automatically become a link to the URL from your clipboard.

@mentions

@mention a team member by typing @ . A menu with available team members will pop up for you to select from. Team members will receive a notification when mentioned in check-ins and comments.

Markdown

You can also use Markdown to format your check-ins. The rich text editor will automatically convert Markdown into rich text format.