Ernest Hemingway kept a chart beside his office desk to log his daily word count. When asked why, he said it ‘kept him honest.’
Most companies track progress in some form. While this is often used for management oversight, progress logging offers benefits beyond micro-management. These reports serve as journals, providing a window into not just what you accomplished, but how you felt about the work.
When reflecting on your workday, you typically ask yourself: ‘What did I get done today?’ This question helps you review your accomplishments. While people tend to focus on measurable outputs - emails sent, meetings attended, code written - it’s equally important to consider your emotional response to the work:
- Were you productive?
- Did you struggle with something?
- Did you have your best idea yet?
In cushion.so, we built Automatic Checkins for this purpose.
Cushion is a collaboration app that helps distributed teams organize projects, communicate, and accomplish their goals. Checkins help team members update each other about their progress, keeping everyone aligned - like a standup, but better.
Daily checkins involve everyone, from the CEO to junior engineers, making work transparent across the company.
Team owners can configure checkins in their ‘Workspace settings’ by setting a regular reminder time. We’ve found that teams vary in their preferences - some schedule checkins early in the day, while others prefer end-of-day updates.
We maintain an open format for checkins. There are no mandatory questions or required responses. This flexibility allows people to express what they consider important in their own words.
Rob Hough
Connecting Your Work
Work happens across multiple platforms - whether it’s writing posts, updating CRM systems, or pushing code. We automatically import high-priority activities from Cushion into checkins, including written posts, resolved discussions, and provided feedback.
This automation eliminates the need to manually track daily activities, allowing users to focus on meaningful reflection about their work.
We also offer key integrations. Since most Cushion users are technical teams, we prioritized GitHub integration. We automatically track PR activities including opens, merges, and review requests.
Building the Github x Activity integration
To build this integration, we allowed users to authenticate Github using OAuth.
When a user clicks “Connect GitHub”, we redirect them to GitHub’s authorization page. This page asks the user to approve specific permissions (scopes) that our app is requesting. We include a randomly generated state parameter to prevent CSRF attacks, which is stored in our KV.
If the user approves, GitHub redirects back to our callback URL with a temporary code. We exchange this code for an access token by making a server-side request to GitHub’s token endpoint:
const { code, state } = req.query;
// Verify state to prevent CSRF
const oauthState = await kv.get(`github_oauth_state:${userId}`);
if (state !== oauthState) {
return res.status(400).json({ message: "Invalid state parameter." });
}
const tokenRes = await fetch("https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token", {
method: "POST",
headers,
body: JSON.stringify({
client_id,
client_secret,
code,
}),
});
const { access_token } = await tokenRes.json();
await db.insert(userIntegrations).value({type: "GITHUB", access_token, userId, teamId });Once users have connected their personal github account, we can start to look for their activity using the Github API and Octokit SDK. We also have a team settings area where the Github team ID is stored, so we can filter only the work they do within that teams org in their activity.
To prevent spam, we make the call whenever the user is starting to write their checkin but requesting whenever the onFocus event occurs within the checkin submission box.
We can then pull all the work they’ve done.
On the client, we then manage the states like so:
function CheckinActivity() {
const { githubActivity } = useGetCurrentUsersGithubActivity();
const { cushionActivity } = useGetCurrentUsersCushionActivity();
// Normalise and merge activities together
const activities = [...githubActivity, ...cushionActivity].reduce<
Record<string, ActivityItem[]>
>((acc, item) => {
const {id, type} = item;
const key = `${id}-${type}`;
if (!acc[key]) {
acc[key] = [];
}
acc[key].push(item);
return acc;
}, {});
function getActionStyle(action: string) {
switch (action) {
case "github_merge":
return "bg-purple-200 dark:bg-purple-200 text-purple-500";
case "cushion_resolved":
return "bg-cyan-200 dark:bg-cyan-200 text-cyan-500";
case "cushion_feedback":
return "bg-red-200 dark:bg-red-200 text-red-500";
case "github_review":
return "bg-emerald-200 dark:bg-emerald-200 text-emerald-500";
default:
return "bg-gray-200 dark:bg-gray-200 text-gray-500";
}
}
function getActionStatus(action: string) {
switch (action) {
case "github_merge":
return "merged branches";
case "cushion_resolved":
return "resolved post";
case "cushion_feedback":
return "left feedback on";
case "github_review":
return "marked for review";
default:
return "updated";
}
}
return (
<AnimatePresence mode="popLayout">
<ul className="flex flex-col p-0 m-0 gap-3">
{activities.map((activity, index) => (
<motion.li
key={index}
initial={{ opacity: 0, y: 10, filter: "blur(2px)" }}
animate={{ opacity: 1, y: 0, filter: "blur(0px)" }}
exit={{ opacity: 0, y: -10, filter: "blur(2px)" }}
transition={{
type: "spring",
bounce: 0,
duration: 0.2,
delay: index * 0.1,
}}
className="flex items-center gap-2 p-0 m-0"
>
<div
className={cn(
"relative flex items-center justify-center size-5 rounded-md ring-2 ring-gray-2 z-10",
getActionStyle(activity.action),
"bg-gray-2 dark:bg-gray-2",
)}
>
{activity.icon}
</div>
<div className="flex items-center gap-1.5 text-sm flex-wrap">
<span className="font-medium text-primary">Rob Hough</span>
<span className="text-secondary">
{getActionStatus(activity.action)}
</span>
{activity.type !== "github" &&
activity.item.map((item) => {
return (
<button
key={item.id}
className="px-1 py-0.5 h-6 leading-none rounded-md bg-gray-3 hover:bg-gray-4 text-primary font-medium text-sm flex items-center justify-center"
>
{item.emoji && (
<span className="mr-1">{item.emoji}</span>
)}
<span className="truncate max-w-[190px]">
{item.title}
</span>
</button>
);
})}
{activity.type === "github" &&
activity.item.map((item) => {
return (
<Tooltip content={item.tip}>
<a
key={item.id}
href={item.url}
className="text-sm font-medium text-primary underline"
>
{item.title}
</a>
</Tooltip>
);
})}
</div>
</motion.li>
))}
</ul>
</AnimatePresence>
);
}On checkin submission we would save a copy of these JSON data to our checkin under metadata so we could keep a snapshot of it in time.
Motion React is added so we can animate in the activity items nicely.
What users think
Checkins remain in beta as we continue testing and improving the feature. Our beta users have found checkins to be a useful alternative to daily standups. One user said that the checkin feature alone would be a product he would use as keeping a work log really helps him know how he’s progressing. Another user found that the checkins ‘really help me and my co-founder stay on top of who has done what’.
We’ve also recieved feedback that added further integrations with other apps like Google Drive or Hubspot would be useful as well as providing an option to automatically write the checkins for you.