This is the half of the box most people never find, and it is the half that saves the most time.
Write what you want to happen, in the words you would use to a colleague, and it becomes a real record.
Chase the Al Moosavi invoice at 4pm @Ausaff
That is a task, due today at four, with a colleague on it. Nothing was filled in.
Getting into it
Three ways, and they all reach the same place.
Press ⌘; (or Ctrl+; ), which opens the box straight into the capture lane.
Type an @ anywhere in the search box. Nobody searches with an at-sign, so it is treated as an unambiguous signal and the box switches lanes mid-sentence, carrying what you have already written.
Take the Create row beneath the search results.
There is also automatic switching: write something with more than one time in it, or with sequencing words, and the box recognises a plan rather than a search and moves itself.
What it understands in the sentence
The date and time parsing is the same as the Plan surface, so anything that works there works here.
| You write | It reads |
|---|---|
today, tonight, tomorrow |
That day |
monday, fri, next monday |
The next one of those |
in 2 days, in an hour, in 30 minutes |
Counted from now |
p1 to p4 |
Urgent down to low |
9am to 11am, for 45 minutes |
A duration estimate |
Whatever is left after the parsing becomes the title.
The @-verbs
This is the part that makes it more than a quick-add box. Typing @ opens a short menu, and the entries are not only people.
@a colleague puts them on it as a collaborator.
@team reaches everybody in your department, without you naming them.
@cockpit escalates it into Triage, so it lands in somebody's Needs you rather than sitting quietly in a list.
@huddle turns it into a real NearSync meeting, scheduled, through the same pipeline as anything created on the calendar.
@ the assistant's name sets a reminder rather than a task.
Clients and contacts can be added the same way, and adding somebody external forces a meeting provider that they can actually join, because huddles are internal only.
Everything you have added shows as a row of chips above the composer, each removable, so the reach of what you are about to create is visible before you commit to it.
When one sentence is several things
Write something with two times in it, or with "and then", and it is treated as a plan rather than a single item.
Call Sara at 4, then a thirty minute review after that
That is two things with a relationship between them, and the second is placed after the first ends.
This path shows you an editable preview before anything is created, and nothing is written until you confirm. Two guarantees are worth stating: anybody it proposes to invite is checked against your real directory, so an invented address is dropped rather than used; and the ordinary single-item path never involves the assistant at all, so the common case stays instant and free.
What comes out
A task lands in your Plan, in the right bucket for its date.
A meeting appears on the calendar, with its attendees and provider.
A reminder surfaces at its time, and shows in the Happening now section of the deck.
An escalation appears in the Cockpit under Needs you.
All of them are real records in the same places they would be if you had created them by hand, and they behave identically afterwards.
Four sentences that work
A task with a time.
Send the revised quote tomorrow at 10
A task with somebody on it.
Chase the Meridian invoice at 4pm @Priya
A meeting.
Kickoff with @team on Thursday at 2 for 45 minutes @huddle
Something that needs to be somebody's problem.
Contract review needs a decision today p1 @cockpit
None of those required a form, a date picker or an assignee menu, and each one produces a record identical to what those screens would have made.
What you see before it commits
The composer shows what it understood as you type: the date, the time, the priority, and a chip for every person or verb you have added.
Nothing is created until you commit, and for anything with more than one part there is a full editable preview first. If a chip is wrong, remove it. If the date reads wrong, the sentence is wrong, and correcting the sentence corrects the date.
The chips are the safeguard. A capture that quietly resolved @team to the wrong department, or added somebody you did not mean, is visible before it happens rather than after somebody gets a notification.
What it will not create
Anything with a body. A task gets a title, a date, people and a priority. A long description belongs in the record itself, added afterwards.
Anything against a specific record. A task raised here is not automatically linked to a deal or an invoice. If the link matters, create it from that record instead.
Anything recurring. One sentence makes one thing. Recurring work is set up on the calendar or in Automations.
Anything for somebody who cannot see it. Adding a colleague who lacks access to the context produces a task they can open and cannot act on, and nothing warns you.
Why this beats the form
The argument is not that forms are bad. It is that a form asks you to translate.
You already know what you want. Writing "chase the invoice at 4pm and loop in Ausaff" is one thought. Opening the task screen, typing a title, choosing a date, choosing a time, opening the assignee picker and finding a name is the same thought broken into six pieces, and the cost of that is not the seconds. It is that you stop doing it, and the thing never gets written down at all.
After it is created
Whatever you made behaves exactly as it would have if you had used the full screen.
A task appears in Plan, in the bucket its date puts it in, and in your Cockpit if you assigned it to somebody else.
A meeting appears on the calendar with its source colour, sends invitations, and can have the recorder sent to it.
An escalation lands in the Cockpit under Needs you, for whoever it was aimed at.
A reminder surfaces at its time and shows in the Happening now section of the deck.
There is no separate inbox of things created this way and nothing to review afterwards. That is the point: the capture box is a faster door into the same rooms, not a parallel system.
Two habits
Capture the moment you think of it. Two keys from any screen, and you never lose the thought to a navigation.
Say the reach out loud in the sentence. @cockpit and @team are the difference between something you will remember and something somebody else will act on, and both are three keystrokes.
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