Use Slack Remind to Remind Yourself, Colleagues, or Delay Action on a Message

Slack offers a Remind feature that can help keep things from slipping through the cracks. You might not have noticed it, however, so let me show you how to use it to remind yourself, your colleagues, or even delay action on a message.

Message Remind

You can access Remind two different ways. The first is to delay action or repeat a message later. To access this functionality, click the three dots (ellipsis) when you hover over any message. There, you’ll find Remind in the popup window.

Click the Ellipsis

Click it, and you’ll get another popup offering to Remind you in 20 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, Tomorrow, or Next Week. Here’s what Slackbot sent me in 20 minutes.

Delayed Message through Slack Remind

You can do the same thing by tapping a message in Slack for iOS.

Slack Remind iOS Screens

/Remind Does More

You can also set a reminder that’s independent of any given message by using /remind. Type it now, and you’ll see

/remind [@someone or #channel] [what] [when]

To wit, I could type:

/remind @jgamet that Bryan is awesome in 5 minutes

I got this:

Slackbot is wise, for Bryan is awesome

And you can bet that in five minutes, Slackbot reminded Jeff that I’m awesome. I didn’t see it and no one else on the team saw it, but Jeff did, indeed, see it.

Note, by the by, that Slack is smart enough to handle “five minutes” or “5 minutes.”

Reminders Are What You Make of Them

We’re all wired differently, and Slack’s Remind will be what you make of it. For instance, when Dave was pointing this feature out to us in our morning meeting, Jeff immediately began looking for an IFTTT recipe that would pop a Slack Reminder directly into Omnifocus.

Dave, on the other hand, is most interested in using Slack Reminders to delay action on messages he reads while out and about. I am just barely able to use Reminders elsewhere in my highly connected world, but I think using them within Slack on my Mac might really help me.

My point is to think differently about them and figure out what works best for you, whether you use Slack Remind to remind yourself, your colleagues, or delay action on a message.

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