"…no marketing whatsoever, other than LinkedIn posts, Twitter posts, the Slack App Directory, the app's dedicated web site, and the content marketing piece you're reading right now."
I work at the company where we made this Slack app
Really other marketing things came after, and it's mostly the Slack App Directory that got the app to 200K+ users–that and the fact that nothing else like this existed that was free.
There is a significant amount of good luck involved in all fortunes and I don’t say it to diminish the effort or originality of the endeavour. There are plenty of brilliant ideas, groundbreaking discoveries, and even useful software projects no one has heard of despite fair amount of marketing too.
Slightly off topic, but as a relatively recent convert from Android to iOS, one of the things I miss most is the ability to schedule messages with Textra.
I live on the East Coast now, but most of my friends are back on the West Coast. Sometimes, I have a thought or idea in the EST morning that I want to send to a west coast friend. That’s far too early in PST to be receiving messages—who knows who forgot to mute sound before going to bed—so I loved being able to schedule a text message to send during a decent hour on the West Coast.
Sounds like a super useful feature for slack. Would love it in iMessage.
I always thought that a "silent" message would be a good option, in addition to scheduled message. The sender would be able to pick a "don't make a sound or vibrate the recipients device" option when sending a message. This would probably be a feature for 1:1 messages or chat apps (WhatsApp, etc) more than sending to entire channels (but I guess that would be on okay option too).
Unfortunately timers in Shortcuts are incredibly limited (tried to use it to turn off a smart light after 15min)
Which is a shame, there's so much potential in Shortcuts but every time I face a use case and come up with an idea I seem to hit a limit in what's allowed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've used the Timy (https://timy.website/) free tier for this in the past. The one feature that was missing though was to schedule messages to be sent at a certain time in the recipient's timezone. Unfortunately it looks like MessageThemLater doesn't support that feature either.
