From “can you handle this?” to a real task
Select the message in your chat app, send it to UnaTask from the Services menu, and it’s a task with the day it names as its deadline. The ask stops drowning in the thread.
The UnaTask team, Building UnaTask. Jun 11, 2026. 4 min read.
Someone drops it in the channel at 11am: “hey Nadia, can you handle the staging deploy before the demo Thursday?” Nadia is mid bug, types “yep, on it,” and means it completely. Then three other conversations happen in the same channel, a meme, a question about lunch, an incident, and the message scrolls into the past.
Chat is where work gets requested and where it quietly goes to die. The ask was real, the agreement was real, but neither of them is anywhere except a thread that’s now four hundred messages deep. Thursday arrives. The deploy didn’t. Not because anyone dropped it on purpose, but because “yep, on it” lived in a place designed for talking, not for remembering.
Capture it where it’s said
With the UnaTask app on your Mac, it takes one gesture from any chat app, Slack and Discord included. Select the message, then open the app’s menu in the menu bar and choose Services, New Task in UnaTask. Give it a keyboard shortcut in System Settings and it’s a single keystroke. The first line becomes the task, the rest of the selection comes along as its notes, and a small notification tells you where it landed.
- A day in the text becomes the deadline. “Before the demo Thursday” is due Thursday, no date picker.
- It reads the line the way the capture bar does, so a priority or a length you mention is kept too.
- Nothing gets lost in the gap between “sure, I’ll do it” and actually doing it.
It works just as well when the ask is for someone else. A lead can catch “can someone own the release notes?” in the moment, then open the task and give it to a specific person, instead of hoping a volunteer remembers by morning. The request stops being a hopeful broadcast and becomes an owned commitment.
That’s the real shift. Most “we forgot to do X” isn’t a discipline problem, it’s a translation problem: the work was stated in one place and needed in another, and nobody made the jump. The shortcut exists so the place your team already talks becomes a place work gets captured, not just discussed. The thread stays a thread. The task becomes a task.
Same channel, same 11am ask. This time Nadia selects the message and presses her shortcut. It lands due Thursday, with the ask itself in the notes, and she goes back to her bug. The message scrolls away exactly like before, but the work doesn’t go with it. Thursday morning the deploy is sitting in her list, with who asked and why written right on it.
Chat is great at starting work and terrible at holding it. The fix isn’t to talk less. It’s to let the talk become tasks on the way past.