Follow-ups in Connect
A follow-up is a dated commitment on a channel, carrying a reason. There are six channels — email, whatsapp, sms, phone, any and task — and a drain executes the ones it owns when they fall due. The task channel is the exception: it is work for a person, and no drain ever sends it. Almost every rule in this section follows from those two facts.
What a follow-up is made of#
- A person
- Who the commitment is to. A follow-up hangs off the canonical Person, which is why it survives a merge and why the duplicate rule can be about a person rather than about an address.
- A when
- The due time, in the timezone the promise was made in. It is not a reminder date for you — it is the moment the drain becomes willing to act.
- A channel
- One of six. It decides who executes: a drain, or a human being.
- A reason
- Why this exists. Not optional in any useful sense — a commitment with no reason is worthless to whoever inherits it, and that includes you in three weeks.
There is deliberately no free-form status field. What a follow-up has instead is a small vocabulary of things that can happen to it — it can be scheduled, become due, be attempted, be completed, be cancelled, be snoozed, or be stopped along with every other follow-up for a thread or a person. Each of those is a recorded event rather than a word somebody typed.
The six channels and who executes them#
| Channel | Executed by | What that means in practice |
|---|---|---|
email | The email drain | A reply or a fresh message under the mailbox's autonomy mode |
whatsapp | The WhatsApp drain | A message on the handle the person is known by |
sms | The SMS drain, where a provider carries SMS | Outbound SMS is provider-dependent; the live carrier carries none, so this is not a channel to promise a customer on that account |
phone | runner.chase_phone | Two rows per tick through voice_engine.place_call, with the same gates as any outbound call |
any | Whichever channel fits when it comes due | Useful when the promise was about content rather than about a medium |
task | A person. No drain ever sends it. | It appears as "For a person to do" and stays there until somebody does it |
Everything in this section#
- Creating a follow-up — by hand, from a conversation, or from a call, and what each route records.
- The reason on a follow-up — what a good one contains, and why a bare 'follow up' is a defect.
- Due dates and times — how spoken and written times become a due time, the timezone rule, and the fallback.
- Choosing the channel — which channel a commitment lands on, and how it is decided.
- Follow-ups for a person to do — the
taskchannel and where it appears. - Changing a follow-up — what can change, what cannot, and what a change records.
- Approval on a follow-up — when one is required and what a rejection does.
- Executing a follow-up — the drain, the gates, and the result written back.
- Completing a follow-up — manual and automatic completion.
- Duplicate follow-ups — what counts as the same commitment.
- A follow-up that is too late — the twenty-four-hour cut-off on a call-back.
- Overdue follow-ups — where they surface and what clears them.
- Follow-ups for the Owner and for a customer — one queue, one drain, two doors.
Where follow-ups show up#
The follow-ups screen is the full list, with the task rows grouped under their own heading because they need a different kind of attention. due and upcoming are the two queries that matter day to day: what is actionable now, and what is about to be. summary is the count you see on a person's record — the number of open commitments to them, which is the honest measure of how much you owe that relationship.
Anything that needs a decision rather than an action appears in Needs You alongside held replies and approvals, ranked with them rather than in a separate queue. A follow-up that has been attempted and refused is the usual reason one turns up there.
Questions#
Is a follow-up the same as a reminder?
No, and the difference is who acts. A reminder tells a person to do something at a time. A follow-up on email, whatsapp, sms, phone or any is executed by a drain unless a gate stops it. Only the task channel behaves like a reminder, and it says so on the screen.
Can Connect create a follow-up without being asked?
It creates one when a conversation contains a commitment — a promise to ring back, to send something, to check and confirm. That is the point: the promise already exists, and the row is what stops it evaporating when the call ends.
What stops a follow-up going out to somebody who asked not to be contacted?
The same suppression and do-not-contact rules that stop any outbound message. A follow-up is not a privileged path around them; execution runs through the channel's ordinary gates.