Keeping your team in the loop

Teamwork doesn’t happen without coordination. Imagine a bunch of people walking around a pitch black room. How would they move without bumping into each other? They’d talk. Specifically, they’d start coordinating by verbalizing what they intend to do so people around them can act accordingly.

That pitch black room is your team whenever you’re not working shoulder-to-shoulder. The way you coordinate? Status updates. All to say, status updates are important. But that doesn't mean they need to be time-consuming or tedious. Enter Steady and Smart Check-ins.

Smart Check-ins are one of the core tools in Steady. Their purpose; keep individual teams in tight sync without daily stand-ups or status meetings. Here’s how they work:

⏰ Steady reminds you when it’s time for an update. You never have to think about it.
📎 Steady's Smart Check-ins automatically attach work artifacts like pull requests, issues closed, commits, etc. Never manually track work again.
🤖 An AI-enhanced editor does time-saving things like summarize pull requests you merged. No more repeating what you already wrote.

Steady takes care of 90% of the work so you can quickly answer the key question — “what’s next?” — and move on with your day.

The questions

The three questions that Steady asks are the fastest and simplest way to share progress, plans, and blockers with your team fast. With just a few sentences or bullets, you can share what you accomplished, where you're focused, and if you need help.

The default questions are:

What did you do previously? This is where you share what you've accomplished since your last check-in. Quick Fill will automatically update your previous intentions and pull in activity from tools like GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Linear, and Asana, saving you time.
What do you intend to do next? Here's where you share what you plan to accomplish before your next check-in. Sharing your intentions with your team is the easiest way to keep everyone up-to-date on your plans and means you can course correct when needed before wasting a day.
Are you blocked by anything? This is where you can surface anything that is blocking you. Team leads will receive notifications when you enter a blocker so you can get help fast. This means you'll get the attention needed to remove the blocker and can get back on track.

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.

Using check-ins to plan your day

Steady gives you ownership over your work: instead of absorbing commands, you declare your intentions. You decide what the 2-3 top goals are for the day and share that with your team. They get full context, and you can execute without waiting on directives.

To make that process easy, the sidebar on the check in page lists all the goals you're an owner of or contributor to, bringing your most important initiatives to the surface so you can effectively plan and prioritize your day.

We recommend checking in first thing in your day so you can make sure you're focused on the top priorities, your team is aware of your plans and can provide feedback or help, and you can spend the rest of the day focused on making progress.

Writing good check-ins

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.

For example, instead of "Meet with Bob at 1PM," try "Outline the devops guide with Bob."

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 where you can share anything impacting your productivity or issues that prevent you from moving forward, like "Waiting on a review from @Monique" or "At 50% due to caring for a sick child."

Team Leads will be notified when you enter a blocker, and you can use @mentions to notify other team members.

Checking into multiple teams

If you're a member of multiple teams, checking into all of them just works.

If you’re on multiple teams but only want to check into a single team, you can use the menu at the bottom of the check-in form to pick any combination of teams you want. Check into one team, a few at a time, whatever makes sense. For most people, sharing a single check-in is the best approach, so everyone has full context of what you're focused on.

After you’ve published, the in-app Check-in button and team selection menu keeps track of which teams you haven’t checked into yet.

Drafts

You can "schedule" your next check-in by creating a draft. Draft check-ins will automatically be published 15 minutes before your team summary reports are delivered.

To save information for your next check-in, select the “Check in” menu item in the top navigation bar and then the -> button on the top right. This will take you to the check-in form for the following day.

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.