How to Use Slack Reminders

Andrew Buck May 30, 2022

Slack provides some powerful features that can help boost your daily productivity, one of which is Slack reminders.

Slack reminders help make sure you never forget an important message, task or appointment. The reminders feature is flexible and versatile, allowing you to set reminders for many different use cases. You can set personal reminders, or reminders for specific team members or channels.

Best of all Slack reminders are a standard feature with all Slack plans, free and paid, despite offering the power of a paid software tool.

Read on to learn more about how to set up and use Slack reminders.

Further Reading:

Learn more about how to level up your Slack game with these Slack hacks, tips and tricks.

How Slack Reminders Work

When you set up a reminder in Slack, the platform’s built-in chat bot (Slackbot) will send you a notification with whatever you need to be reminded about.

If you set a reminder for yourself or for a specific person, it will come through the Slackbot direct message channel – no matter which channel or message thread you were in when you set up the reminder.

Otherwise, you can set up reminders for an entire channel, in which case Slackbot will send a message to that channel.

Whether or not you get a push notification about the reminder will depend on your notification settings. If you have notifications turned on for mentions and direct messages, you’ll get a notification for the reminder.

How to Set Reminders in Slack

There are a few convenient ways to set up a Slack reminder.

First, to set up a simple reminder for yourself, type /remind in the message bar, in any Slack channel or message thread. From the options that come up, slick Set yourself a reminder.

You’ll get a popup window (“Create a reminder”) where you can fill in all the necessary details – the date and time you want to be reminded, and the details of the reminder.

You can also get to this popup modal by going to the Slackbot channel, clicking on the name at the top of the page, and going to Set yourself a reminder.

If you want to skip this step, you can set up a reminder directly from the message bar, using the reminder command.

You just need to know the simple syntax for a reminder. Start with /remind. Then who should be reminded, what the reminder is, and when to remind them.

For example:

/remind me to post my daily report in 15 minutes.

This line contains the three pieces of information you need for a reminder.

Slack reminder time syntax

The “When” can be done a few different ways.

Alternatively, use quotation marks around the reminder and you don’t need to write “in”, “at” or “on”.

For example:

/remind me “message boss” 2pm.

There’s also a number of ways you can phrase the date, day and time. Slackbot is pretty nifty at deciphering this. Try whatever feels most natural to you – Slackbot will let you know if it can’t understand.

Remind yourself about a message

Finally, you can also set a reminder about a specific message. To do this, open the “More actions” menu on the message (the little three dots icon when you hover over it), and choose “Remind me about this”.

You can choose one of the preset times (e.g. in 20 minutes, in 1 hour, tomorrow, next week), or set your own time to get a reminder. 

How to Manage and View Your Slack Reminders

You can view all your reminders at any time by typing /remind list into the message bar. Here you’ll get all the reminders you’ve set up, for yourself, others, and any reminders that other team members have set for you.

This list is separated into upcoming reminders, recurring reminders, past and incomplete reminders, and completed reminders.

From this list, you can mark reminders as complete, delete, or snooze them.

Marking as complete is a great way to use this section as a to-do list in Slack. Mark any tasks you’ve finished as “Complete”, and you’ll easily be able to view anything that’s still open or unfinished.

This is especially powerful as a to-do list because of how you can set yourself to be notified about each task at a specific time, which is a feature that usually only comes with paid to-do list software.

How to Edit Reminders in Slack

Unfortunately, there’s no way to edit a Slack reminder.

You can snooze reminders that have passed the notification time. But other than that, the only options are to mark them as complete, or delete them altogether.

So the best way to edit a notification would be to delete it and create it again. This takes a little more work than if you could edit it with one click, but it will achieve the same result.

Recurring Slack Reminders

As we mentioned a little earlier, you can set up recurring reminders to keep going continuously. 

These reminders can’t be marked as complete from the /remind list. They can only be deleted.

To set up a recurring reminder, you’ll need to use the syntax in the message bar.

Just type “every” before the time you want these reminders. For example:

/remind #general post daily reports every Monday and Tuesday at 9am.

A recurring reminder will continue running until it’s deleted.

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Best Ways to Use Slack Reminders

You can use Slack reminders in a lot of worthwhile and creative ways.

They’re extremely versatile, so there’s a lot you can do with them, however your workflow is set up.

Here are a some examples of what you can use Slack reminders for:

Experiment with using Slack reminders for different things that come up in your workday – you might be surprised at how useful this can be for your daily productivity.

Final Thoughts

Of the 12 million people using Slack every day, a lot of them are not using Slack to its full potential. Slack reminders are one feature that holds a lot of power, but which most people don’t really know how to use.

Whether you want to keep your team on a timeline, make a to-do list for yourself or any number of uses, Slack reminders are a pretty awesome thing that Slack offers for all users, free and paid.

Check out the tips above to start making use of Slack reminders in your workflow, or click here to read more in the Slack help center.

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