# Overdue follow-ups

Overdue means the due time has passed and nothing has closed the row. It shows on the follow-ups screen, and in Needs You when it needs a decision rather than an action — ranked with everything else a person owes rather than in a queue of its own. Completing, cancelling or snoozing clears it; on the phone channel, the lateness rule eventually clears it for you.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/follow-ups, #/needs-you
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/follow-ups/overdue/

## What overdue is, and what it is not

It is not a state somebody sets. A row is overdue because time passed and it is still open — which means the set of overdue rows changes without anything happening, and a queue that was clear last night is not necessarily clear now.

It is also not the same as failed. Some overdue rows have been attempted and refused; some are held for an approval nobody has worked; some are `task` rows that nothing was ever going to execute; and some are simply waiting for the next tick. Those four need different responses, and the row's own recorded outcome is what tells them apart.

| What the row shows | What is happening | What clears it |
|---|---|---|
| `awaiting approval <id>` | Held for a person, and still ageing | Approve or reject it in Needs You |
| `refused: <reason>` | A gate stopped the attempt | Fix the gate, or decide the commitment differently |
| Nothing recorded, `task` channel | Nothing executes this, by design | Do the work, then complete the row |
| Nothing recorded, drained channel | Waiting for a tick, or newly due | Usually nothing — look again in a minute |

## How it is ranked

Anything needing a decision joins Needs You and is ranked with held replies, approvals and operational issues rather than kept apart. The argument for that is simple: a call-back promised to a customer yesterday and a held reply on a first enquiry are the same kind of debt, and two screens make them impossible to weigh against each other.

On the follow-ups screen itself, lateness is the thing to read first and the `task` grouping is the thing to read second. A `task` row three days late is not a system that failed; it is work that nobody has done, and it will still be there tomorrow unless a person picks it up.

## Working an overdue queue

1. Take the phone rows first, oldest first.
   - Result: They are the ones with a deadline of their own — past twenty-four hours they stop being callable at all.
2. Clear the held approvals next.
   - Result: Every one of them is a customer waiting on a decision that takes seconds, and they age against the same clock.
3. Read the refusals and deal with the gate, not the row.
   - Result: One suppression or one exhausted allowance is often behind several rows at once; fixing it clears them together.
4. Finish with the `task` rows, and be honest about the ones you are not going to do.
   - Result: Cancelling with the reason intact is better than a queue that quietly stops meaning anything.

> **Careful** An overdue queue that never empties stops being read, and that is the real failure — not any individual late row. If a workspace is consistently generating more commitments than it keeps, the fix is upstream: fewer promises, or a different channel for them.

## What overdue rows say about a relationship

`summary` on a person counts what is open against them, and overdue rows are the part of that count with a story attached. Before contacting somebody about something new, it is worth seeing whether you already owe them something old — an outreach message to a person with two overdue commitments reads very differently to the person receiving it.

The timeline is the other half of the picture. It shows what actually happened with the relationship, which is how you tell an overdue row that represents a genuinely broken promise from one that was superseded by a conversation nobody closed the row after.

## Questions

### Does an overdue follow-up keep retrying?

A drained row is re-examined on ticks, and a specific case — a line that is not ready — is retried in an hour. What does not happen is an endless loop of attempts: refusals are recorded, and on the phone channel the twenty-four-hour rule ends the matter.

### Can I see everything overdue for one customer?

Yes — the person's record shows their open commitments, which is the right place to look before contacting them again. The queue answers 'what is late today'; the relationship answers 'what do we owe this person'.

### Do overdue follow-ups affect what Connect says to the customer?

They are part of the relationship's context rather than a separate instruction. Whether an outstanding commitment shapes the next reply depends on what is in Knowledge and memory for that relationship.

## Related

- [Follow-ups in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/follow-ups/)
- [A follow-up that is too late](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/follow-ups/stale/)
- [Approval on a follow-up](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/follow-ups/approval/)
- [How Needs You is ordered](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/needs-you-ranking/)
- [Completing a follow-up](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/follow-ups/completion/)
- [Customer 360](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/customer-360/)

## What this page is based on

- `docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md` §7 — `due`, `upcoming` and the drain
- `docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md` §7 — the follow-up operations and `summary`
- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py)