Follow-up reminders that actually reach you
We went looking for the most common thing people use Pokobot for and got two different answers depending on how we counted. By sheer volume it is drinking water, which is not close. By the number of separate people doing it, the winner is reminding yourself to contact somebody: call them, chase them, check back with them.
32 of 92 people have set one. That is more than water (29), more than meetings (14), and more than every other category we can identify. It is the broadest behaviour in the product, and the volume ranking hides it completely because a handful of people set water reminders every two hours forever while everyone else chases one person at a time.
So this page is about the thing the most people are quietly doing, and how to do it in a way that survives a busy week.
Why follow-ups slip in particular
A follow-up is created inside somebody else's conversation. You are on a call, or in a thread, and you say some version of “let me check and come back to you.” The promise is real, it takes four seconds, and it is immediately buried under whatever the conversation does next.
Every other kind of task gets written down because there is a natural pause around it. A follow-up has no pause. You are still talking to the person, and opening a task app mid-sentence is not a thing anyone does.
So the follow-up lives in your head, where it competes with everything else in there, and loses. Not because you did not care, but because the moment it was created was the worst possible moment to record anything.
Catch it in the same app you made the promise in
If the conversation was on WhatsApp, the fix is short: switch to the Poko chat, type one line, switch back. It is a few seconds, which is roughly the budget you actually have, and it works mid-conversation in a way that opening a task manager does not.
Write it the way you would say it. There is no project to file it under and no form to fill, which is the entire point: the reason follow-ups get lost is that recording them normally costs more attention than you have spare at that exact second.
remind me to call Ravi back at 4follow up with the Indore lead on Tuesday at 11amcheck with accounts about the invoice tomorrow morningSet the chase when you send the first message
The strongest habit here is counterintuitive: set the follow-up at the moment you send the original message, not later. You are the only person who currently knows what you asked for and when a reply would be late, and in two days you will not.
The shape is always the same. Send the thing, then immediately set a reminder for the point at which silence becomes a problem. If they reply in the meantime, cancel it in one message. If they do not, the reminder arrives already knowing what it is about.
This matches what the data shows about timing. Across all one-off reminders, 87.8% are due within twenty-four hours and about half within three, so people are not scheduling chases weeks out. They are setting a tripwire for later today or tomorrow.
remind me to chase Priya about the quote on Thursday at 10amif no reply from the vendor, ping them again tomorrow at 11cancel 2When one nudge is not enough
Some chases need repeating: the supplier who never answers first time, the client who owes you a signature, the colleague who genuinely means to get to it.
A reminder can repeat on any schedule, and for a chase that usually means daily rather than hourly. Add a daily window if you set anything faster, so it stops in the evening instead of buzzing at midnight.
Be honest about the limit here, because it matters for this use case specifically: nothing in the reminder can tell whether they replied. It repeats until you cancel it. That is a feature when you want persistence and an annoyance when you forget to switch it off, so cancel it the moment the reply lands.
chase the signed contract every day at 10amnudge me about the vendor every 3 hours between 10am and 7pmlistReminding the other person instead
Sometimes the right move is not to chase them yourself but to have the reminder go to them. That works here, with their agreement and only through an explicit command: a message starting with the word “poke” sets a reminder for a saved contact instead of for you.
The first one asks that person to accept before anything is delivered, and they can revoke it later, at which point reminders from you stop. An ordinary message never routes anywhere but back to you, which is deliberate: sending a reminder to the wrong person is a failure worth designing out rather than getting mostly right.
Use it sparingly and for people who have asked for it. It is very good for a colleague who wanted the nudge and a poor substitute for a conversation with one who did not.
poke Rahul to send the invoice at 5pmWhat this does not replace
This is not a CRM. There is no pipeline, no deal stage, no record of what was said, and no report at the end of the month. If you are tracking forty live opportunities and need to see them as a board, use a CRM and keep it.
It also cannot read your inbox, so it does not know whether the person got back to you. Every reminder here is a tripwire you set and you cancel.
What it replaces is the mental note you made mid-call, which is the step where follow-ups actually die.
Questions, answered
- What is the most common thing people set reminders for?
- It depends on how you count, and the two answers are genuinely different. By volume it is drinking water, because a few people repeat those every couple of hours. By the number of separate people doing it, the winner is contacting somebody: 32 of 92 people in our data have set a reminder to call, chase, or check back with a person.
- How do I set a follow-up reminder on WhatsApp?
- Send one message to a reminder bot describing it in plain English, for example “follow up with the Indore lead on Tuesday at 11am”. Pokobot messages you back at that time on WhatsApp. The useful habit is setting it the moment you send the original message, while you still know what you asked for.
- Can it keep chasing until the person replies?
- It can repeat on any schedule you like, but it cannot tell whether they replied, so it runs until you cancel it. For chases, daily is usually the right interval. Send “cancel 2” the moment the reply lands.
- Can the reminder go to the other person instead of me?
- Yes, with their permission. A message starting with “poke” sets a reminder for a saved contact, and the first one asks them to accept before anything is delivered. They can revoke it at any time. An ordinary message always sets your own reminder, never theirs.
- Is this a CRM?
- No, and it does not try to be. There are no deals, stages, notes or reports. It is a way to make sure the follow-up you promised in a conversation actually reaches you later. It is free for 7 days with no card and no signup.