Guide · 19 August 2026
Most assignments that disappear in a chat were handed out without a named owner or a deadline, and nobody was asked to report back. Careless people are rarely the cause. Here is what breaks, and seven rules that fix follow-through without rolling out a heavyweight system.
Written for a work group in Telegram: a department, a branch office, contractors, a project team.
There are four reasons, and each comes from how the request was worded. The people who received it are rarely the problem.
“Folks, we need that report” is addressed to everyone and therefore to no one. When several people could take it on, each of them assumes someone else will. Psychologists call it the bystander effect, and the more people see a request, the less likely any one of them is to act on it.
“By the end of the week”, “when you get a chance”, “ASAP” are not deadlines. There is no moment at which such a request becomes overdue, so there is no moment at which a reminder is due either.
No one is obliged to say “done”. The work counts as finished when the person who asked happens to find out, or never finds out and discovers the gap in a meeting.
Forty messages later the request has scrolled away. Nobody will go looking for it: it is easier to hand the same job to whoever is online right now. Sometimes two people end up doing it, and sometimes nobody does.
Each rule changes how a request is written, and you can start with your next message instead of waiting for people to change their habits.
“Could someone handle this” is the most common shape of an assignment that never happens. Name the person. If the work is shared, split it. Instead of “put the deck together”, write “Marat: the sales slides; Dilnoza: the financials”. Then each part has a single person responsible for it and a status of its own.
Joint work without a split is fine too, but then every participant reports individually rather than the senior one reporting for all.
“By the end of the week” reads differently to everyone: Friday 6 p.m. to one person, Sunday night to another. Write “by 22 Aug, 18:00”. With an exact time everyone reads the deadline the same way. The task also gets a moment when it becomes overdue, and a reminder can go out ahead of that moment.
If the assignee sets the date rather than you (“when can you do it?”), still insist on an actual date and record it exactly like an assigned one.
When one person answers for five, you are monitoring their memory rather than everyone else’s work. Whoever did the work marks it done, and the assignment closes only once everyone has, not when the first person reports.
There is a side effect that often matters more than the tracking. Once the group sees progress name by name, anyone falling behind can see it for themselves, and the manager does not have to point it out in front of everyone.
Once the deadline has passed, a reminder can only help you work out what went wrong. A useful one arrives a day, three hours and an hour before, and it goes privately to whoever has not finished. A public “reminder for everyone” punishes the people who already delivered and stops working by the third time.
The group should hear about an overdue task exactly once. If the group chat gets “still not done” every morning, people stop reading it within a few days.
When the assignee marks the work done, that is their claim about it. Until the person who asked accepts the work, the assignment is not closed. Sign-off takes seconds and removes the most common argument: “but I did it” versus “that is not what I asked for”.
Work sent back for rework should stay on the same assignment, with its history and the same person. If it becomes a new task, the earlier discussion is lost and the statistics no longer match what happened.
A weekly report or a monthly reconciliation runs on a schedule, and so does opening the shift every morning. Whoever creates these by hand will miss one sooner or later, usually in a week that is already overloaded. A recurring assignment should appear on its own, and its absence should be noticeable.
If you have to scroll back through the conversation to work out where things stand, that is detective work. An assignment needs one card that updates instead of ten messages about it. Open the card and it tells you what has to be done, by whom and by when, and who has already reported.
Every assignment has to answer these three questions. When one answer is missing, the message is closer to a wish, and nobody can be held to it.
A practical test: reread the message as if you were not the author. If it is unclear who exactly has to do something and at what point it counts as done, rewrite it before sending.
You can follow the rules above by hand. The bot is for the busy weeks, when nobody has time to check each message against them.
The mechanics are covered on the home page; how this differs from other Telegram task bots and trackers is broken down in the comparison with alternatives.
Do not migrate the old ones. Start with the next assignment: name the person, set a real due date and agree that marking it done is mandatory. Within a week you will see which assignments used to simply vanish.
For a small team a full tracker is usually overkill: it gets set up, the work still happens in the chat, and the system drifts away from reality. It is more practical to leave the work where it already happens and add tracking on top of the conversation.
Tracking annoys people when it is manual and public: “any update?” in the group chat. A private reminder before the deadline and a status everyone can see remove the need to ask at all.
Silence is already a signal once an assignment has a deadline and a mandatory report. First a private reminder before the deadline, then a single public notice that it is overdue. Daily nagging in the group chat does not work, because people stop seeing it.
No. The assignee’s mark is a claim; what closes the assignment is your sign-off. Checking takes seconds and costs far less than discovering the wrong result a week later.
Easier to try than to read about
Add DeloPulse to a work group and assign a task to two colleagues with a deadline. You will see the difference on the first card. It costs nothing and needs no sign-up.
Add the bot to a group