We just launched a major overhaul to activity tracking, and improved how we track meeting time. Read on to learn more.
🧾 All new activity tracking
A major benefit of Steady is not only that it aggregates all of your activity from various tools in one place, but contextualizes that activity through written check-ins and goal updates. But due to how activity tracking was implemented back when Steady was still Status Hero, it was easy to “miss” contextualizing activity whenever you miss a check-in, planned or otherwise.
For example, if you take Friday off, none of your activity from Thursday would be attached to your check-in on Monday when you’re back at work. That’s because the activity was always associated to a team-and-day-specific check-in report; Friday’s in this example.
Now, activity is primarily associated with people instead. Going back to our example, now when you check in on Monday, all of your activity from Thursday will show up, just like you’d expect. In short, all activity gets associated with actual written check-ins, with no gaps.
Another benefit of this change is that we no longer record multiples of activity for each team a person is on. We were doing a lot of behind the scenes work to not actually show those duplicates, but it wasn’t a perfect system and dupes would pop up in certain scenarios. That goes away entirely.
Finally, this change also affects behavior when people don’t check in. We still show activity from the previous workday, just like today. But for a small number of teams that are still using “activity as participation” – a feature we soft deprecated last year – there’s a change. Now, activity alone will no longer count as “participating” in check-ins.
⏱️ More comprehensive meeting tracking
We want our meeting time report to be a source of truth for how much time teams are spending in meetings, but before now, it wasn’t telling the full story. It was only focused on calendar events, or in other words, planned meetings. But as you’re well aware, there’s a significant amount of unplanned meetings too. “Hey, can you jump on a quick Zoom?”, etc.
To reflect that reality, the meeting report now incorporates activity from Zoom, and reconciles where there’s overlap between your calendar and Zoom. It makes for more accurate time tracking for planned meetings, and adds coverage for all of those unplanned meetings. The end result is a much more accurate, complete picture.
We’re planning to incorporate ad-hoc meetings in MS Teams too; stay tuned.
As a reminder, if you haven’t checked out the new Steady desktop app, give it a try. With native notifications and a focused, clutter-free experience, It’s the very best way to use Steady.
— The team at Steady
