From “can you handle this?” to a real task
Right click a Slack or Discord message and turn it into a task, assignee and deadline included. 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
In Slack, use the message shortcut. In Discord, right click, Apps, create a task. Either way the message becomes a task in UnaTask without anyone leaving the conversation, and you set who it’s for and when it’s due right there in chat.
- Pick the assignee and the deadline inline, in a couple of clicks.
- The task links back to the original message, so the context comes with it.
- 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 turn “can someone own the release notes?” into a task assigned to a specific person, with a date, in the moment, 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. We’re rolling these out 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 hits the shortcut, sets it to herself, due Thursday morning, and 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 at the top of her list, with a link straight back to who asked and why.
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.