Which follow-ups did I promise but never do?

Why broken follow-up promises are different from missed activity

A missed follow-up promise is worse than a missed touch. Generic "we should reach out to this lead" is a hygiene issue. A task the rep typed themselves — "send proposal," "follow up Tuesday," "check in after their PTO" — is a commitment the buyer is now waiting on, often without knowing it's been forgotten.

The signal:

1. Rep-created task (not auto-generated by a workflow or sequence).
2. Task is 7+ days overdue.
3. Status is still Not started or In progress — never marked complete.

That combination is a buyer-facing failure. Either the rep needs to get back to it now, or they need to actively un-commit ("we got pulled into another project, the proposal is delayed by two weeks") rather than ghost.

The dollar cost is direct: deals with a rep-promised follow-up that's been ignored convert at significantly lower rates than the same deals with timely follow-through. Buyers notice. The follow-up is the rep's word.

What "creator equals assignee" actually filters out

Three task properties:

1. Task type = To-do (or Call / Email if your team logs those granularly).
2. Due date is more than 7 days ago.
3. Status is not Completed.
4. Created by = the deal owner (filtering out workflow-auto-created tasks).

The "created by" filter is what makes this a promise signal rather than a generic overdue-task signal. Workflow-auto tasks are noisy — they include hygiene reminders, automated cadences, etc. Rep-created tasks are commitments.

Why the filter clears faster than the buyer's expectations

Two known issues:

Reps "complete" tasks without actually doing them. A rep cleaning up their task list at end of day might mark "follow up with Acme" as complete when they didn't actually follow up. The task disappears from the view; the buyer is still waiting. Detecting this requires looking at what happened next — was there a logged call/email after the task was completed? If no, the completion was likely fake. That's a separate audit, not part of the basic rule.

Sequence-generated tasks pollute the count. Some teams configure sequences to auto-create follow-up tasks when the sequence ends. Those technically have the rep as the creator (because they enrolled the contact). The rule then flags them, but they're not really "promises" the rep made — they're system-generated reminders. Filtering by sequence-association removes these but is an extra layer to maintain.

The deepest friction: tasks aren't always created at the moment a promise is made. A rep verbally tells a buyer "I'll follow up Tuesday," ends the call, and forgets to log the task. There's no rule that catches verbal promises — only logged ones. The rule catches diligent reps who write down their commitments. The reps who don't write things down are invisible to it. Which is its own kind of signal.

The manual HubSpot recipe

Three filters in the Tasks view, with the creator-equals-assignee filter doing the heavy lift on signal-vs-noise.