Scheduling and reminders

A useful frame: there are three kinds of time-based asks, and they map to three different mechanisms inside Jootle.

You said	What it actually is
”Remind me to take out the recycling tonight”	A reminder
”Email me a summary of the week every Friday at 4pm”	A goal
”Wait until the contractor’s quote arrives, then summarize it for me”	A follow-up

The first one fires once at a specific time. The second one fires repeatedly on a schedule. The third one fires when a condition is met, not when the clock strikes.

This chapter walks through each.

Reminders

A reminder is the simplest: a one-time alert at a specific time. Ask in plain language:

“Remind me to call the bank at 3pm.”
“Tomorrow morning, remind me to confirm the dentist appointment.”
“Two hours before the team standup, remind me to look at the pull request queue.”

Your AI sets it up. When the time comes, the reminder shows up on your default channel (web notification, Telegram, whichever you’ve set as default).

You can list active reminders (“what reminders do I have set?”), cancel them (“cancel the dentist reminder”), or change them (“move the bank reminder to 4pm instead”).

Reminders don’t loop. Each one fires once. If you want something that fires every day, you want a goal, not a reminder.

Goals (the recurring kind)

You’ve already met goals in Playbooks and goals. The short version for this chapter: a goal runs on a schedule, and on each firing your AI decides what to do based on the goal’s rules and current state.

The shape of recurring asks goals are good for:

Daily. “Each morning, send me a brief on what’s coming up today.” “Each evening, ask me what I got done.”
Weekly. “Every Sunday evening, summarize the week.” “Each Monday morning, send me the open task list across all projects.”
Custom intervals. “Every 6 hours, check the contact form inbox and tell me about anything urgent.”

You can also pin a goal to a specific time of day, days of the week, or both:

“Every weekday at 9am, brief me on the calendar.”
“Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 6pm, summarize that day’s activity.”

Goals show up in the Goals view in your sidebar. Each one has a schedule, the rules (what it should do on each firing), an owner (you, or a project, or a program), and a history of past firings with results. If a goal is misbehaving, you edit it there.

Follow-ups (the conditional kind)

The third kind is the most interesting and the most underused.

A follow-up doesn’t fire at a fixed time. It fires when a condition is met. Examples:

“When Mike replies to the kitchen quote thread, summarize his answer and ping me.”
“If the website goes down between midnight and 6am, send me a Telegram.”
“When the contract from Acme is signed, kick off the kickoff playbook.”
“If I haven’t heard back from the lawyer by Friday, draft a follow-up email.”

Your AI sets up a watcher. Until the condition is met, the follow-up sits quietly, costing nothing. When the condition fires, the follow-up does its thing. After it fires, the follow-up is done (it doesn’t loop unless you also tell it to).

You can have many follow-ups active at once. They’re listed under the Goals view, generally, with a different icon or filter to distinguish them from recurring goals. Some toolkits use them heavily (“the CRM toolkit waits for client emails matching certain patterns and routes them appropriately”).

Combining them

These compose. A goal can include reminders. A follow-up can fire a goal. A reminder can be a tiny one-line side effect of a larger workflow.

Concrete example: “Run the weekly review on Sunday at 4pm. After producing the report, ping me on Telegram. If I haven’t read it by Monday at 9am, also email me.”

That’s: one goal (the Sunday weekly review), one reminder (the Telegram ping after the report finishes), one follow-up (the email if you haven’t read the artifact by Monday morning). You don’t have to spell it out as three things; describe the behavior you want and your AI assembles the pieces.

”Remind me” vs. “schedule a task”

A subtle distinction. A reminder is for you (“at 3pm, ping me to call the bank”). A scheduled task is for your AI (“at 3pm, run the weekly export”).

You might use both kinds in the same week. Your AI is happy to do either; you just want to be clear about who’s expected to act.

When the schedule is fuzzy

Real life has fuzzy times. Your AI can handle them.

“Tomorrow afternoon.” Defaults to 2pm unless context says otherwise.
“First thing in the morning.” Defaults to your working-hours start.
“End of day.” Defaults to your working-hours end.
“Sometime this week.” Asks you when, or picks a sensible slot.
“In a couple of hours.” Computes 2 hours from now.

If your AI’s interpretation is wrong, correct it the first time: “By ‘first thing’, I mean 7am, not 9am.” It’ll remember.

Quiet hours and respect for time

Most customers don’t want their AI pinging them at 2am.

In your settings, you can specify quiet hours (default: 10pm to 7am in your time zone). Goals and follow-ups that fire during quiet hours get queued and delivered at the start of the next active window, unless you’ve explicitly marked them as urgent.

A reminder you set for 11pm fires at 11pm; you asked for that time, so it goes through. But a recurring goal that happens to land at 11pm gets held.

You can override per-goal. “Notify me even at night if the site is down.” That’s an explicit opt-out for that goal.

What this looks like in practice

Most customers, a few weeks in, have:

Two or three reminders for the day, set casually as life happens.
Three to six goals running in the background (a daily brief, a weekly summary, an inbox check, maybe a billing-cycle nudge).
A handful of follow-ups attached to ongoing threads.

Your AI manages the scheduling so you don’t have to. You’ll see things arriving on time, and occasionally a “by the way” follow-up will trigger that you’d half-forgotten you set up. That’s the system working.