A 9:41 PM text gets an answer.A 9:41 PM form waits for 8 AM.
Your Wingman keeps texting hours, like a good employee. The one exception is someone who just texted you.
The Wingman team · · 3 min read
Two people reach Ridgeline Roofing in the same minute, 9:41 on a Tuesday night. Megan texts the office: the storm took a bunch of shingles off her roof, can someone come take a look? Alyssa fills out the free inspection form on the website, about the same storm.
Ridgeline’s Wingman is called Dawn, and she runs on autopilot, so she sends on her own. Megan hears back at 9:42 PM. Alyssa hears back at 8:09 the next morning. Both are the right call, and the reason is the one rule this post is about.
Texting hours
Texting hours are 8 AM to 9 PM by default, and you can change them. Inside those hours, your Wingman works the way you’d want a good employee to: new leads hear back within minutes, and follow-ups go out at sensible times of day.
Outside them, it holds. A follow-up that comes due at 10 PM doesn’t go at 10 PM. It waits for the morning, and before it sends, every rule is checked again. If the person replied overnight, or asked you to stop, the held text never goes out.
The 30-minute rule
There’s one exception, and it’s the reason Megan heard back at 9:42. Someone who texts after hours gets an answer if they texted in the last 30 minutes.
It’s the same call a good office manager would make. A person who texted you a minute ago is holding their phone, waiting to hear back. Answering now is simply good service.
Alyssa is in a different spot. She asked to be contacted, but she didn’t start a conversation, and a first text from a company at 9:45 at night can feel like being sold to. So first texts and follow-ups wait for texting hours. The exception covers your Wingman’s replies to someone who is texting you, and nothing else it sends on its own.
Forms at night
A form that arrives overnight gets its first text at 8 AM, somewhere between 8:00 and 8:15, so a night’s worth of forms goes out a few minutes apart rather than all at once. Alyssa’s went at 8:09.
The text itself was written the night before, when the form came in, so it’s ready the moment the window opens. Every rule runs again before it sends. And if Alyssa had texted the office overnight instead of waiting, she’d have gotten a reply to that text under the 30-minute rule, and the held first text would never have gone out.
Your approval sends at any hour
Texting hours apply to your Wingman, not to you. When someone on your team approves a draft or sends a text, it goes when they say so. If Kayla, Ridgeline’s office manager, approves a reply at 10:15 PM, it sends at 10:15 PM.
That’s deliberate. A person looking at a specific conversation can judge the hour better than a rule can. It’s also how night texts work in review mode: Dawn drafts the reply at 9:42 PM, and it goes the moment someone approves it.
The rules that protect your customers still apply to everyone. Nobody can text someone who opted out, whoever presses send.
What this looks like in the inbox
A text that’s waiting for the morning already sits in the conversation, dimmed, with “Queued” under it, so you can read exactly what will go out before it does.
If you’d rather it didn’t go, turn your Wingman off for that person with the switch at the top of the conversation, or text them yourself. Either way, the queued text stays unsent. The rest of the rules your Wingman keeps are in what your Wingman will never say.
