How to turn Teams and Slack messages into tasks before they scroll away

Chat is where a lot of work is now requested. “Could you look at this when you get a sec?” arrives in a channel, you react with a thumbs-up, and within an hour it is buried. A week later someone asks how it is going, and you scroll up trying to find it.

The problem is that chat is a conversation, not a list. Here is how to get the tasks out of it.

The built-in options, and their limits

Both Teams and Slack have ways to mark a message for later:

• Saved messages or bookmarks. Quick, but they are a pile, not a list. There are no dates, and the pile grows faster than anyone reviews it.
• Reminders on a message. Slack lets you set a reminder on a message, and Teams has similar options depending on your version. Good for a single nudge, less good as a system, because the reminder lives in the chat app and not with your other tasks.
• Create a task in Planner or To Do. Works if your organisation uses them, but it usually means leaving the conversation and filling in a form.

These are fine for occasional use. If chat is where most of your requests arrive, you need something faster.

Capture the request in your own words

The fastest reliable method is to write the task yourself, immediately, in one line:

Review Ana's pricing slides before thursday standup #work

Your own words are better than a link to a message, because they include the action and the deadline, which the original message often did not. If you need the original, add a few words of context such as “from #pricing channel” so you can search for it.

With Jot, that is Ctrl + Shift + J, the line, Ctrl + Enter, and you are back in the chat before the next message arrives. It also records which app you were in when you captured, so the Teams request shows where it came from. See remembering which app you were in for how that works.

Reply with the date you wrote down

When you capture a request, answer it with the same date: “Will do, by Thursday morning.” That small reply does two things. It turns a vague request into an agreement, and it means the person asking does not have to chase you.

Do the same for email

The same principle applies to requests that arrive by email: one line in your own words, with a date, captured at the moment you read it. The approach is covered in how to turn emails into tasks.

Review once a day

Captured chat tasks are only useful if you look at them. A daily glance at today’s list, ideally first thing in the morning, is enough. Anything without a date goes on the weekly review. The aim is that nothing important lives only in a chat history.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.