Sending messages in real time is a life-saver. Until it is not.

Interrupting during meetings, on weekends or holidays is not making you any good.

Thankfully there is a solution – sending the message with a delay or scheduling the message 🕒.

Currently it is not possible to do it directly in Slack, but there are dozens of plugins to accomplish that 💡.

In this tutorial I am going to show you, that you can Send a slack message with a delay like so:

/delay in 10 hours hello John, let's do the meeting tomorrow

1. Install plugin

The easiest way to send a message with delay is to use a plugin. In this tutorial I am going to be using The Top Chat.

The Top Chat allows you to send delayed messages to people, chats and private groups.

Go to our homepagehttps://thetopchat.com and click “Add to Slack“.

2. Allow permissions

As with any other Slack application, it is required that you allow some required permissions for the app to work. The Top Chat will ask you for permissions on two consecutive screens.

Allow Slack permissions on this screen
Allow Slack permissions on this screen as well

3. Send your first message

By allowing the permissions the plugin has been installed and you can start using it right away.

3.1 Click “Let’s begin”

On the welcome screen click “Let’s begin” and you will be shown your first message to sent.

3.2 Open Slack

After you were scrolled down to the site there is a button “Open Slack” that is going to open the slack workspace that you have just installed the plugin.

3.3 Test sending your first scheduled message

Now you are prompted to send your first message. Click “Copy” and switch to your Slack workspace and try to send the message just to yourself in Slack – in order to test it out.

The message is supposed to be send in 1 minute from now.

4 Check the message in queue

After you’ve hit Enter the plugin shows a confirmation message informing you about the message being sent and also the sending time.

That’s it. This is a simple way how to send scheduled messages in Slack.

You can use a wide range of commands, for example:

  • /delay “my message” in 1 minute
  • /delay “my message” in 3 hours
  • /delay “my message” in 2 days
  • /delay in 1 minute “my message”
  • /delay in 3 hours “my message”
  • /delay tomorrow at 8am “my message”
  • /delay tomorrow morning “my message”