🔖 Slack Improves Task Management and Introduces "Later" View

The feature hasn't rolled out to everyone yet, but it should help your team organize those reminders.

If you’re like me and heavily use the Slackbot Reminders feature in Slack, you’ll be pleased to know that Slack is releasing an update that helps us manage those reminders, or “tasks”.

In this new “Later” view, that has been rolling out since March 2023 according to their announcement, you have three tabs:

• In progress: for all reminders that are still pending and haven’t been marked as completed yet. This includes overdue and upcoming reminders.

• Archived: for messages you had previously marked as “bookmarked”. Slack actually merged two features into the “Later” feature: the “Slackbot Reminders” and the “bookmarked” messages.

• Completed: for reminders you marked as completed.

A preview of how the Later view looks like, with sample tasks.

You can also quickly create a new reminder by clicking the “New reminder” button at the top right corner of the page. I believe this wasn’t possible via UI before, you had to write a command in Slack like “/remind remind me to review all open pull requests by 5pm“, so for those of you who are not used to the command proper syntax/format, having this feature readily available in a visual interface should be really helpful and lower the barrier of entry for users that still don’t use Slack reminders.

The new reminder creation prompt.

Why would I manage tasks/reminders within Slack? Why not a proper project management tool like Jira, GitHub Projects, Trello, etc?

If you’re curious as to what are the use cases that justify using Slack Reminders, check out my other blog post where I fully utilize Slack features and share some tips & tricks to become a Slack super user:

The ultimate guide to becoming a Slack super user 🦸‍♂️

Conclusion

I think this is an exciting new feature to use within Slack, and I can’t wait for it to become available to everyone. I believe it provides a clearer view into what’s overdue and what’s next, by properly displaying the reminders by due date, helping us prioritize them.