Welcome

The who, why, and how behind this simple but useful daily check-in tool

K.T. Wiegman

Why this exists

My company is migrating from Basecamp to Coda. Overall it’s been a smooth changeover, but we’ve been missing one critical Basecamp function: the daily check-in.

We wanted a simple way for folks to:

take a minute to reflect on what they accomplished yesterday

set their goals for today

alert the team if they need anything

...and see what everyone else is up to

How it works

Team members visit every morning and press Create a new update to begin. The doc will use their most recent previous update to populate the Yesterday field, but all the fields are editable.

The Save button sends the update to the archive. Made a mistake? Tap Edit to make changes and Save again to record them.

Team members can opt in to get a Slack reminder every weekday at 10 a.m. if they haven’t completed that day’s update.

Behind the scenes

The first key table is My Update. Users will only see their own rows in this table, preventing conflict if multiple people are using the doc simultaneously. The Save button adds the user’s information from this table to All Updates, the base table that lives on the hidden Backstage page. Every row in My Update is wiped automatically at 1 a.m. daily so that everyone can start fresh in the morning.

Today’s Updates and Archive are views of All Updates. If Coda allowed it, I would set Today’s Updates to be read-only to prevent people from editing other people’s stuff. Cross-doc can solve this security flaw, but it makes the doc less responsive as users won’t see their newly added updates unless they manually sync — and even then, syncing sometimes takes a while before the new stuff shows up. So we’re going with trust until table-level permissions become a thing (and how I will bless that day!).

Subscribing to notifications uses the Slack Pack and the Team Members table on the hidden Backstage page. Each row has a hidden Notify button that sends a Slack reminder to fill out today’s update. The button is disabled if the person has submitted a update that day or has not opted in to reminders. An automated rule pushes every active button on weekdays at 10 a.m. I’ve set the automated rule and the Slack Pack so that the notifications appear to come from me.

Try it out

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First, copy this doc...

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...then update the placeholder data

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Edit the Team Members table on the hidden Backstage page

Be sure to update your Slack Pack settings

You may need to double-check Take actions as for each automated rule

Thanks for taking a look!

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