How to turn a conversation into work

Hovering a message reveals a small toolbar, and three of its buttons turn talk into something the business keeps. This is the part of chat no standalone messaging tool does, and it is worth five minutes of your attention.

On a touchscreen, tap the message row to reveal the same toolbar.

The green tick: make it a task

Creates a task from the message. The title is pre-filled from the message's first line and the description from the whole message, and it lands in the channel's department by default.

You still choose the assignee, date and anything else, exactly as with any task, so nothing is created behind your back. See How to create a task.

The task keeps a link back to the chat message it came from. That link is the valuable half: whoever picks the task up in a fortnight can read the conversation that caused it, which is almost always where the real detail is.

Write the first line of a message as a title when you already know it will become work. "Chase Portside on the lab dip" makes a better task than a sentence that starts "so I was thinking".

The button appears if you can create tasks in that channel's department.

The coral phone: log a callback

Creates a callback, posting a card into the conversation. The first teammate tagged becomes the caller and the first customer tagged becomes who to call.

So tagging both people in the message before you press it fills the callback in for you. See How to tag people, tasks, documents and products.

The card is then workable inside the channel: No answer logs an attempt and keeps it on the list, Mark called back closes it, Reopen brings it back, and the pencil edits the details.

That is what makes a callback different from a task. The team can see somebody has tried three times without opening anything.

Its action buttons appear only for the people allowed to act on that callback, and a status change shows for you immediately while others see it on their next reload. See How to log and work through callbacks.

The amber gavel: record a decision

Records a decision with the message text pre-filled as the reasoning, and posts a plain confirmation back into the channel.

This is the one people underuse. A decision reached in a channel at 4pm on a Thursday is otherwise gone, and reconstructing it a year later is a week's work and a wrong answer. See How to record a decision.

Pick what it affects from the list: Purchase Order, Supplier, Campaign, Task, Wholesale Account or Wholesale Order.

The gavel appears for leads and above.

If the confirmation cannot be posted back into the channel, the decision is still saved and you get a warning saying only the announcement did not go out. Nothing is lost.

Starting a thread about an order

From the store's recent orders list rather than from chat: the speech-bubble button on an order row opens a new thread with the order attached as a clickable chip.

That is the fastest route from "this order looks wrong" to the right people looking at it. See How to look up orders and check your fulfilment backlog.

What happens if the message is deleted afterwards?

Nothing. A task, callback or decision created from a message survives the message being deleted.

Note that the text was copied at the moment you created it, so later edits to either do not sync. What the task says is what the message said at the time, which is the honest record.

Which should you use?

• Somebody has to do something: a task.
• Somebody has to ring somebody: a callback.
• Something was settled: a decision.

If two apply, use both. A decision about an order and a task to place it are different records and both are worth having.