Commitment tracking

You promised it. It lives nowhere.

“I'll send that over by Friday” is a real obligation with a real deadline, made in a subordinate clause in the middle of a paragraph about something else. It never becomes a task. It becomes an apology, eight days later.

A commitment is a promise with an owner, a deadline, a state and a source — captured from the sentence that created it, and tracked in both directions: what you owe, and what you are owed.

Not the same as a to-do list. A task is something you decided to do and can quietly drop. A commitment is something another person is now expecting, on a date they remember, and dropping it costs you with them rather than with yourself.

TaskFieldCommitments · 4 openExample workspace · illustrative data

I'll send the updated deck by Friday.Your email · June 4, 11:02 AM

Open

You owe Priya the updated deck2 days overdueOverdue

Sarah owes you the pricing confirmationAsked Aug 7 · no replyWaiting

James owes you the signed order formDue ThursdayOpen

4 open1 overdue2 of them owed to you

Want me to draft the follow-up?Draft itSnooze to Monday

One promise, three states. The row does not get replaced when Friday passes — it changes colour and rewrites its own due line, because it is the same obligation in a worse condition.

Why it happens.

They are made in passingAlmost no promise arrives in a sentence that looks like a promise. It is the second half of a line about something else, in a paragraph about a third thing, in an email whose subject is a fourth.

Capture is manual and therefore optionalTurning a sentence into a tracked item costs a context switch. Under load, the promises that get written down are the ones made when you happened to have a spare thirty seconds — which is not the same set as the important ones.

One direction gets tracked, at bestPeople who track anything track what they owe. Almost nobody tracks what they are owed, which is why a deal stalls for three weeks on a document you asked for once and never chased.

The deadline outlives the memoryYou remember the promise for about as long as it takes to send the next email. The other person remembers it until it is either kept or noticed — and noticing is the expensive part for them too.

Why it gets missed.

Your inboxThe sentence that created the obligation is preserved perfectly, in a thread that fell off the first screen four days ago. Search finds it only if you already remember it exists.

A task managerIt holds whatever you typed into it, faithfully and forever. It knows nothing about the promise you made twenty minutes ago and did not type into it, which is most of them.

A general AI assistantAsk it what you promised and it can only answer from the thread you pasted. It has no standing record, so it cannot tell you what is overdue across sixty relationships — only what is in this one.

The questions it answers.

Every finding runs the same seven questions, in the same order. This is what they come back with here.

What happened?On June 4 at 11:02, in the middle of a reply about scheduling, you wrote that you would send Priya the updated deck by Friday.
What changed?Friday passed. The obligation did not disappear — it changed state, from open to overdue, and the row rewrote its own due line rather than being replaced by a different one.
What do I owe?One item, two days late: the updated deck to Priya. Three other commitments are open, two of which are owed to you rather than by you.
What are they waiting on?Priya is waiting on the deck and has not chased it, which is the harder case — an unchased overdue promise is one that is being noticed and not mentioned.
What's at risk?Reliability, which is the only thing you have with a contact before there is a contract. An overdue commitment also feeds the relationship score directly, so this is already showing up as a decline elsewhere.
Why does it matter?Because the cost is not the deck. It is that the next thing you promise her carries a discount she applies without telling you.
What should happen next?Send it, or move it explicitly. A draft is ready that acknowledges the date rather than skipping past it — and if Monday is honest, moving it on the record is worth more than another silent day.

What it will not tell youWhether a sentence was a promise or a courtesy. “I'll take a look” and “I'll send it Friday” are not the same commitment, and the second one is not always meant as firmly as it reads. Extraction gets the clear cases right and marks the ambiguous ones as unconfirmed rather than quietly promoting them — an invented obligation is worse than a missed one, because you will act on it.

Agreement driftWhen the terms get restated and nobody negotiated.Relationship decayWhat an unchased overdue promise turns into.CommitmentsThe layer that captures and holds them.Meeting briefsOpen commitments on both sides, an hour before the call.

Straight answers.

Does it track what other people owe me?

Yes, and that is half the point. A commitment they owe you is the same object with the owner flipped — same deadline, same evidence, same states. Most tools only ever model one direction, which is why the thing your deal is actually waiting on is usually the thing nobody is tracking.

How does it know a sentence is a promise?

Extraction runs over the message and returns structured commitments — who owes what, to whom, by when — each with the sentence it came from. You can open any commitment and read the line that created it, so a wrong capture is visible rather than mysterious.

What about promises made in a meeting?

After a calendar event ends, you are prompted to capture what was agreed. You type it in plain language and it is turned into structured commitments with deadlines and owners. Nothing is transcribed from the call itself.

Will it chase people for me?

It will draft the chase and, if you have granted it that autonomy, send it — inside your working hours, with a hold window, and never on a thread carrying an active agreement flag. By default it drafts and waits.

What happens to a commitment when it's done?

It closes and stays on the record with its evidence. Reliability over time is built from kept and missed commitments, so deleting the history would delete the only measurement that means anything.

See what it finds in yours.

Connect Gmail and it reads your last 90 days. The first thing it shows you is what it found — with the sources.

See what it finds

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