Ask on Slack, Get Reminded on Your Phone

"Since I'm not getting the reminder when I can actually do the task, it is an ineffective reminder and just keeps getting put off over and over again." — Hacking Your ADHD podcast

The Story

Monday morning standup on Slack. Sarah mentions the Q1 report is due Friday. You make a mental note: get that done Thursday afternoon, you'll need a few hours to pull the numbers and write the narrative.

Tuesday is back-to-back meetings. Wednesday you're deep in a bug that eats the whole day. Thursday morning you open Slack and there are 200 unread messages. Somewhere in there is a Slack reminder you set for yourself — it fired at 2pm while you were on a call. You didn't see it. You don't see it now, either. It's buried.

Friday morning Sarah asks for the report. You spend four hours scrambling, pulling numbers from three different dashboards, writing half a report and sending it with an apology.

This isn't a productivity problem. It's a channel problem. The reminder was in the right place at the wrong time — or the wrong place entirely. You captured the task in Slack because that's where you heard about it, but Slack isn't where you'll be when it's time to act.

The Idea

You capture the task wherever you are. The agent figures out when and where to remind you — and shows up with the full context, ready to help you act on it.

What It Looks Like

Capture anywhere. Slack, Telegram, terminal, desktop app, voice note. Wherever you hear about a task is where you capture it. No switching apps, no opening a todo list, no friction.

Deliver where you are. The agent knows your patterns. Weekday mornings, you're on Slack. Afternoons, you're usually on your phone. Weekends, Telegram only. It delivers reminders to the channel where you're most likely to see them and act on them.

Context travels with the reminder. Not just "Q1 report" — the full context: who asked for it, what they need, where the template is, what you did last quarter. The reminder arrives as a briefing, not a Post-it note.

Act on it immediately. The reminder isn't a dead notification. It's the start of a conversation. You can ask the agent to pull data, draft content, check on dependencies — right there in the same thread.

Cross-channel follow-up. You captured it on Slack, got reminded on Telegram, did the work with the agent's help, and the finished report can be posted back to Slack. The agent handles the channel-hopping so you don't have to.

How It Works

• Channels — Slack and Telegram channels both connect to the same agent. A message captured on Slack can trigger a reminder delivered on Telegram. The agent is channel-agnostic — it's the same entity regardless of where you're talking to it.
• Scheduler — One-shot and recurring reminders with timezone awareness. "Thursday at 2pm" creates a scheduled job. "Every Monday before standup" creates a recurring one. The scheduler fires events that the agent picks up and delivers through the appropriate channel.
• Channel preferences — The agent learns where you prefer to receive different types of notifications. Work reminders go to Slack during office hours, Telegram otherwise. Personal reminders always go to Telegram. You can override explicitly: "remind me on Slack" or "remind me on Telegram."
• Memory — When you say "remind me about the Q1 report," the agent stores not just the reminder text but the surrounding context: the Slack thread, who mentioned it, what was discussed. When the reminder fires, it retrieves all of that context and presents it alongside the reminder.
• Coding agent — The reminder can kick off actual work. "Pull the numbers" triggers the agent to query dashboards, generate tables, and draft content. The reminder becomes the starting point of a work session, not just a notification.
• Presence tracking — The agent tracks which channels you're active in to optimise delivery. If you haven't been on Slack in two hours but you just sent a Telegram message, the reminder goes to Telegram. This is observational, not surveillance — it uses the same "last seen" signals that messaging apps already show.

What Breaks Without This

Slack reminders only fire in Slack. If you're not looking at Slack when it goes off — on a call, at lunch, on your phone — you miss it. It becomes another unread message in a sea of unread messages. There's no escalation, no fallback channel, no "try again in 30 minutes."

Calendar notifications are context-free. "Q1 Report" pops up for 10 seconds with no information about what the report needs, who asked for it, or where to start. You dismiss it because you're in the middle of something, and then it's gone.

Todo apps require manual capture. You have to leave Slack, open Todoist or Things, type the task, set a due date, add context. The friction means half your tasks never make it in. The other half go in without enough context to be useful later.

Voice assistants can set timers and simple reminders but have no understanding of your work context. "Remind me about the Q1 report Thursday at 2pm" results in a notification that says "Q1 report" with no context, no ability to help you act on it, and no connection to where you first heard about the task.

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