Slack "Remind me about this": What Happens When the Time Comes

To get a reminder about a Slack message, hover over it, click the three dots (More actions), choose Add a reminder, and pick a time: In 30 mins, In 1 hour, In 3 hours, Tomorrow at 9:00 AM, Monday at 9:00 AM, or Custom. The message goes into your To-dos tab with a due time. When that time comes, Slack puts a Reminder card in Activity. It does not send you a Slackbot message. A reminder is also the only way to get an alert from your own notes, because messages in your self-DM raise no badge.

We set a message reminder in the Slack web app on 29 September 2026 and watched what happened at the due time, then checked the menu again on 8 October 2026. Between the two tests Slack renamed things: the menu item Remind me became Add a reminder, and the Later tab in the left rail became To-dos. The screenshots from 29 September still show the old names; the steps are the same.

Set a reminder on a message

• Hover over the message. A small toolbar appears at its top right.
• Click the three dots at the end of the toolbar.
• Point at Add a reminder (called Remind me before October 2026) and pick a time from the submenu.

The presets are relative to when you click. On a Tuesday, "Monday at 9:00 AM" meant the next Monday. Custom opens a small window with a date and a time. The submenu lists M as the keyboard shortcut for Custom.

Slack's help center says the same menu works on files. On a phone, it says to tap and hold the message, tap Remind me, and choose a time or Custom time.

Pick your own date and time

Custom opens a window called Reminder, with When (a date, set to Today) and Time. The time list moves in 15-minute steps and starts at the next quarter hour. It also accepts a time you type: at 10:04 we typed 10:12 AM, pressed Enter and saved, and Slack kept 10:12.

As soon as you save, the message gets a line above it in the conversation:

That line tells you the reminder is saved. On 8 October 2026 the line read "To-do added · View to-dos", and a pop-up said "Reminder set for Today at 12:37 PM". The message showed up in To-dos under In progress, with "DM with yourself" and "Due in 30 minutes":

Saving a message without a time is a separate action now, Add to saved, and those items live under Saved in the sidebar. How saving works is in Slack save for later.

What happens when the reminder is due

Here is what we saw, minute by minute:

The card in Activity shows where the message was, who wrote it and the text, with a Mark Complete button:

So if you set a message reminder and "nothing happened", look in Activity first, then in To-dos. A 2024 thread in r/Slack describes the old behaviour, a Slackbot DM that said "You asked me to remind you about this message". In our test that DM never came. Other reasons a reminder seems to go missing are in Slack reminder not working.

Snooze or clear it after it fires

In To-dos (Later in our 29 September test), hover over the overdue item and click the clock. The menu is headed "Snooze..." and repeats the same times, plus Clear reminder.

On 29 September we tried Clear reminder. The message stayed in Later as a plain saved item with no due time, and the badges on Activity and Later each went down by one. Use the checkmark instead when you have dealt with the message. On 8 October, Mark complete moved the item to a Completed section under In progress. Changing the time of other reminders works the same way; see how to edit a Slack reminder.

Remind me or /remind

/remind is the other way to set a reminder, and people often suggest it as the fix for message reminders. We set /remind me to reply to the Q4 checklist thread in 1 minute at 10:14:24. Slack answered "I will remind you ... at 10:15AM today", and the reminder came due at 10:15:24, 60 seconds later. It also arrived as a card in Activity, labelled Later (labelled To-do on 8 October), and not as a Slackbot message:

Use Remind me when the reminder is about a message you want to reopen. The card shows the author and the text. Use /remind when the reminder should repeat or should post in a channel for the whole team. Commands you can copy are in Slack /remind command examples, and the /remind builder writes the command from a few menus.