Stop context switching: capture tasks from Gmail, your Mac and your voice
The work that slips is rarely forgotten. It’s the work you couldn’t write down without breaking what you were doing. So let the task come to you, where it already is.
The UnaTask team, Building UnaTask. Jun 26, 2026. 5 min read.
You’re forty minutes into the one piece of real work you protected today. An email slides in: “quick one, can you send the client the updated numbers before Thursday?” You read it. Now you have a small, bad choice.
Option one: you stop, open your task app, find the right project, type it out, set a date, come back, and try to remember where your head was. Option two: you tell yourself you’ll remember, and you don’t, and Thursday arrives without the numbers. Neither option is good, and you make some version of this choice a dozen times a day.
The task should come to you
The work that goes missing is almost never forgotten on purpose. It’s the work you couldn’t capture without paying a tax in focus. So the fix is to drop the tax. The task should be created where the request already lives, in one motion, without you leaving the thing you were doing.
That’s what capturing from your real tools means in practice. Not another inbox to check. A way to turn whatever just landed into a task with its date, then get straight back to work.
Three places it happens
- Gmail: with the UnaTask for Gmail extension in Chrome, one button on the email opens the task already filled in, due date read straight from the message, no retyping.
- Your Mac: in the Mac app, select text anywhere and turn it into a task from the Services menu, without switching windows.
- Your voice: talk through what’s on your plate and it comes back as tasks with dates and people, for the ideas that arrive when your hands are busy. You check them before anything is created.
Each one cuts the same tax: the retyping, the hunt for the right screen, the date you would otherwise have to look up again. The request becomes a task in one motion, and your attention barely has to leave the room.
The same forty minutes, kept
Back to that email. This time you press the UnaTask button right on it, see Thursday already filled in as the due date, and you’re reading the next line of your own work before the interruption even registered as one. The numbers go out on time. Your focus block survives. Nothing slipped, and nothing cost you the thread.
The best place to capture a task is the place the work already is. Every app you have to open to remember something is a small tax on the work you opened nothing to do.
Where this lives in UnaTask: Gmail to task. Turn a Gmail message into a task in one click, without leaving your inbox.