Timers & Reminders

Set a timer in Obvious and the agent will send you a message in the current thread when it fires — no external app needed.

Note: Timers require the agent-timers feature to be enabled for your workspace. If you don't see timer behavior working, contact your workspace admin or reach out to help@obvious.ai.

The quickest way: ask the agent

Type what you want, in plain language. The agent handles the rest.

Remind me to follow up on the proposal in 2 hours

Set a timer for tomorrow morning at 9am — check if the overnight data import finished

Check back in 30 minutes and let me know if the deployment is still running

The agent creates the timer, confirms when it'll fire, and sends a message to this thread when time is up. You don't need to be in the thread when it fires — the message will be waiting for you.

What you can do with timers

Set a one-time timer

Ask the agent to remind you or check something after a specific amount of time, or at a specific time.

• Relative time: "in 30 minutes," "in 2 hours," "in 1 day"
• Absolute time: "at 3pm," "tomorrow at 9am," "on Friday"

Timers can be set anywhere from 1 minute to 30 days out.

Set a recurring timer

Ask the agent to check something on a repeating schedule.

Check the pipeline status every 30 minutes until I tell you to stop

Remind me every Monday morning to update the team report

The agent creates a repeating timer. Each time it fires, you'll get a message in the thread. When you're done, ask the agent to cancel it.

List your active timers

Ask the agent what timers are currently running in this thread.

What timers do I have active?

Show me my pending reminders

The agent knows which timers are live and shows you when each one is scheduled to fire.

Cancel a timer

Change your mind? Ask the agent to cancel it.

Cancel that reminder

Stop the recurring pipeline check

If you have multiple timers, the agent will ask which one you mean.

Snooze a timer

If a timer fires and you're not ready to act on it, ask the agent to push it back.

Snooze that for another hour

Push that reminder back to tomorrow afternoon

How timer messages look

When a timer fires, a message appears in the thread. It looks different from regular agent messages — Obvious renders timer deliveries with a distinct visual style so they're easy to spot in a busy thread.

The agent also knows about your active timers. If you ask it something related to a pending reminder, it can reference what's coming up — you don't need to track them yourself.

Limits

• Up to 25 active timers per thread
• Up to 200 active timers per project
• Minimum duration: 1 minute
• Maximum duration: 30 days

If you hit a limit, cancel timers you no longer need before creating new ones.

Good uses for timers

Timers work especially well for:

• Follow-ups — "Remind me to check in with the client tomorrow"
• Monitoring — "Let me know if this job is still running in 45 minutes"
• Async handoffs — "Check back in 2 hours and summarize what happened"
• Recurring reviews — "Every Friday afternoon, pull the week's metrics and give me a summary"

Tip: The more context you give the agent in your timer request, the more useful the message will be when it fires. "Remind me about the proposal" is less useful than "Remind me to send the revised proposal to Sarah — she needs it before EOD."