The proposal you said you'd send Tuesday

The proposal for Marcus, promised from your phone

Marcus runs operations at a company you helped two years ago. He writes on a Monday: they're thinking about a second phase, could you put something together? You reply from your phone in a car park between calls. "Great to hear from you. I'll send a proposal over by Tuesday."

On Tuesday a client workshop runs long, another client moves a deadline up, and the proposal sits in your head as "that thing for Marcus" until it drops out of your head entirely.

At 11 on Thursday night you're clearing your inbox, you see his name, and your stomach drops. Nothing is lost yet, but you can picture how it looks from his side. He came back to you for more work, and you went silent on the thing you offered him. You'd have written the proposal in an hour. You forgot you'd promised it.

What it costs is hard to see. Marcus works at a company much bigger than yours, and he has to take your name to people above him. A late proposal gives him one more thing to explain, and it makes you look like a one-person shop stretched thin, the impression you work hardest to avoid. He might still sign. He might also ask a second consultant to quote, to be safe, and you'd never hear that he did.

It happens because of how the work runs. Busy weeks push everything that isn't billable to the edges, and promises made in quick replies are that kind of thing. The only record of them is your sent mail, and you don't reread your own sent mail.

To-do apps never hear the promises you make from a car park

You've tried to catch these. A to-do app you add things to when you remember, which misses every promise made from your phone. Stars and flags in your inbox, which pile up until they mean nothing. A CRM with follow-up tasks you had to create by hand after each email, so you stopped creating them. A Friday habit of scrolling back through sent mail, which lasts until the first busy Friday.

Each one relies on you writing the promise down a second time, and the promises that slip are the ones you made in a hurry.

Friday at 7, the follow-up is already drafted

On a Friday when you've kept every promise, Commitment tracker sends nothing. This week it has something to send.

Before 7, the agent has read three weeks of your sent mail and picked out the places you said you'd do something. It has checked each one against what you sent afterwards and found two still open: the case study you told Amara Bello you'd send "by Friday" last week, and the proposal for Marcus, promised for Tuesday. Then it has read your past emails with Marcus and written him a note in your voice. It has written one for Amara too.

At 7 the email lists both, oldest first, each with the thread where you made the promise. The notes are at the bottom.

You write the proposal over coffee, attach it to a reply with the note, and send it before your first call. Next Friday the agent finds it in your sent mail and leaves it off the list.

Nothing sits in your head all week waiting to be remembered. You still make promises in quick replies the way you always have, and the ones that slip get caught within the week, while they're still easy to put right.

How do you follow up on something you forgot to send?

Send it with a short note that says sorry once and asks one question to move the work on. The note to Marcus does that: it says sorry for the slip without making a big thing of it and asks one question about scope. Commitment tracker looks back over the last three weeks of your sent mail, the window its instructions set, so a promise that slipped reaches you within days of its date.

What Commitment tracker checks

Commitment tracker reads what you've sent over the last three weeks and looks for the places where you said you'd do something. It checks whether you already did, then tells you what's still open and drafts the follow-up for the top one or two. It's one of the agents on YouSpot's what follow-ups am I forgetting? page.

The drafts wait for you

• It doesn't send anything for you. You copy a note into a reply and send it yourself.
• If you kept every promise this week, you get no email at all.
• It won't tell you whether an invoice is paid, because it only sees your mail. Invoices have their own agent, in how to chase an invoice without it being awkward.
• It runs because you turned it on. Pause it from its card in a quiet week and it waits until you switch it back on.

Catch this week's loose ends on Friday

1. Sign in at youspot.com.
2. Connect Gmail.
3. Open Agents and pick the Commitment tracker card.
4. Click Try it once to run it now. The first email lands in your inbox within a few minutes.
5. Click Keep it running weekly to keep it on. After that it shows up every Friday at 7am.

You can also ask from the chat you already work in. With YouSpot connected to Claude or ChatGPT, "Draft a follow-up to Marcus about the proposal, in my voice" gets you the note without opening your inbox. Here's how to connect YouSpot to Claude.

Change what counts as a promise

The instructions are plain English, and you can change them in the edit box on the agent.

If most of your promises live in slow-moving threads, look back further. Change "the last three weeks" to "the last six weeks". It will then also catch the article you offered to send after a coffee last month.

You can also tell it who matters most. Add a line at the end: "Put anything I promised a past client or referrer first, even if it's newer." The people who send you work then get your attention before everyone else.