A commitment is a promise with somebody's name on it. You said you would send the deck by Thursday. Your counsel said the redline would land Monday. Someone other than you could notice if it does not happen, and that is the test Brief applies.
Brief reads your email, messages, and meetings and writes these down as it finds them. You record nothing yourself. Commitments sits in the Decide group in the navigation.
What Brief records as a commitment
Two things have to be true. There is a named person on the other end of it, and the obligation is specific enough to be missed.
That last part is what keeps the page short. "We should talk about hiring" is not a commitment. "I will send you the two candidate profiles tomorrow" is.
Brief attaches a due date when the source carries one. Plenty of commitments arrive without one, and those are kept rather than dropped. Group the list by due date and they collect under Due anytime.
Needs you now, and waiting on others
The page opens split in two, because the two halves are different kinds of work.
Needs you now is what you owe. Nobody else is going to move it.
Waiting on others is what somebody owes you. Your job here is not to do the work, it is to notice when a promise has gone quiet and ask about it. This is the closest thing Brief has to an outstanding-requests list.
A commitment only lands in Waiting on others when Brief is confident the other person owes it. An ambiguous one stays in Needs you now, on the argument that a promise you wrongly believe someone else is holding is the more expensive mistake.
What you do on the Commitments page
Every open row carries two controls.
Done closes it. The row stays where it is, struck through, with an Undo beside it for as long as you are on the page. Nothing is hidden from you mid-triage.
Dismiss is for a commitment that stopped being one. Plans changed, the counterparty withdrew the ask, Brief read a line too literally. A dismissed commitment is recoverable. Switch State to All and it is there with a Restore control on the row.
Above the list, State switches between Open, Done, and All, and a search box searches every commitment you have, not just the page loaded on screen.
The settings icon opens Display options, which changes how the list is cut. Group by direction, state, due date, counterparty, when the commitment was created, or where it came from, or turn grouping off. Order by importance, due date, counterparty, or newest. Direction and importance are the defaults and they are the right pair for triage. Reach for the others when you are working one specific question, such as everything outstanding with one person.
When Brief closes one for you
Brief looks for evidence that a commitment was met. A reply saying the deck went out, a calendar event that happened, a task you completed in your task manager. When it finds enough, it closes the commitment itself and marks the row Brief closed this.
That marker is there so you can disagree. A closed row keeps a Reopen control, and reopening asks you to say why, which is what stops the same inference from closing it again.
The Archived section
At the foot of the page sits Archived, collapsed by default. It holds only the commitments Brief ended on its own. What you closed or dismissed yourself is not here, it is under State: All.
Each row says how it ended. Aged out means nobody touched it for long enough that Brief stopped counting it as live. Auto-completed covers the rest. Both carry Restore.
A quiet commitment and a commitment you decided against are two different facts about your work, and Brief keeps them apart. It also means a short list is not proof that everything on it got done.
A commitment is not a task
The difference is the counterparty. A task is yours alone, it goes on your task list, and it syncs with whatever task manager you already use. See Where to find everything in Brief for that side of the app.
A commitment has somebody else in it, which is why it lives on its own page and why it carries a direction. Brief decides which of the two an item is as it reads it, so you are not sorting them by hand.
Where else commitments appear
Commitments ride your daily brief. Decisions do not, though they stay on their own page and in Brief's search. You can turn a type of item off there under Settings in Briefing & Actions. See Tuning your daily brief.
They are also available to a connected AI assistant over MCP, so you can ask for them mid-conversation in Claude or ChatGPT without opening the web app. See Connecting to the MCP server.
If you want commitments turned into delegated work rather than a list you read, From briefing to delegated work walks that through end to end.