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Comment by zrobotics | Hacker News Reader

How is this not a feature of Slack already? Sending scheduled messages is (or should be) a basic feature of a messaging client. I guess I just avoid slack like the plague simply because I hate their android client, but I assumed that was built in.

Although I just checked, and apparently I'm out of touch, as both discord and signal don't offer this feature.

Maybe I'm wierd, but I use scheduled SMS and email all the time. I don't want to ping a coworker on Sunday with something non-urgent, so I schedule a 9am email or text if there is something I think of on the weekend. As the article shows, this isn't that unusual of a request,so why isn't it built in to more messaging clients? I know before I checked, I just assumed that it was a standard feature.

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Dunno, scheduling messages sounds weird to me. Just send it. People will look at it and respond when they want to. They aren’t going to get pinged if they have DnD hours set.

It sets the expectation for a lot of people that they should be checking and responding to messages at all hours.

I’m a night owl, I like to do thought work after the day of busy meetings. I don’t want my direct reports feeling like I expect them to reply at 11pm when I send them an email, or on Sunday if I’m working. So I schedule it to arrive in the morning or in the next work day instead.

You can tell them until you’re blue in the face, but actions speak louder than words.

No idea why you want to miss out on an opportunity to show your boss that you're working late. The only use-case I see for scheduling is to do the opposite and schedule it in the night to pretend to be "going the extra mile" by working outside business hours.

I’m talking about the opposite where you are the boss. I don’t send emails at night so my staff don’t feel the expectation to be constantly checking and replying to me. Just because I work weird hours doesn’t mean I expect my staff to.

If one of my team sends too many emails at weird hours I’d make a point of talking to them about their workload and life balance at an upcoming 1:1 to make sure things aren’t getting too off track.

Because teams want a cultural expectation of normal work hours. I am often a night owl and I’ve sent messages late at night and gotten asked my manager if I’m overworking and since then try to avoid doing it unless I’m responding to someone.

Not all of us are performative, or want to set the expectation that we don't have a personal life.

You're getting downvoted but I have known a lot of people who will set non-urgent emails to delay send at 7:30-9pm so they look like they are working late. It's silly but most of those people ended up getting promoted.

If you don't want people to feel that this is expected then just tell them that you don't expect immediate responses.

By scheduling the message to send in the morning you are just setting the expectation to be awake and respond then, you aren't removing the issue you mentioned, you are just picking a different time to set the expectation.

There is an expectation that during core working hours people will be somewhat responsive. That will differ org to org, and perhaps in your org there are no set working hours. In that case my current approach probably doesn’t hold as much.

My experience has been that simply telling them not to feel obliged to respond doesn’t really cut it, and people feel obligated regardless. This may be a cultural thing too, and again will probably differ company to company and region to region.

we have daily async standups on slack where we post updates. i would love to be able to schedule that message

You can, /remind works in channels. That's how a lot of folks do it.

Ninja edit: you can even leverage mentions in these reminder messages, to ping yourself or your team.

> I use scheduled SMS all the time.

TiL. I barely use SMS anymore. When I opened my client just now, sure enough, there was a little tooltip by the 'send' button telling me I can hold to schedule. I've never considered a need for scheduling SMS before.

Am I right in concluding this is a new thing? If so, I think it's a bit unfair to castigate slack for lacking a feature that's taken SMS 20+ years to adopt.

It's not a feature of SMS, rather it's implemented by SMS clients.

Totally agree with you. It's baffling to me that this isn't a built in feature of Slack. It feels like it should be table-stakes for a messaging client, but it apparently isn't.

Well /remind works in exactly the same way and you can tell it to remind people or channels etc. The fact that it shows as a reminder, not a message as if you just typed does matter in some contexts, but I certainly make heavy use of scheduling reminders in channels when it's important to follow up on something.

For me I think this tool would be better when for example you know it's a birthday coming up and you want to write a message now. It always bugged me that Facebook doesn't let you do this either (although it is obvious why FB want you to have to come back).

But I guess the funny thing about Slack not offering this is they have all the code / infra / text parsing they need to do it, it would surely be trivial to add.

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