Every open task has a Start now button. Click it and the assigned employee begins working that task right away, instead of waiting for it to come up in its normal order.
Adding a task used to mean waiting for your employee to pick it up on its own schedule. Start Now puts you back in control of the moment: click it on any open task, from the board, the list view, or the task's own detail panel, and the assigned employee begins working it immediately.
It works exactly where you're already looking at tasks, no separate trigger screen, no context switch. Fire off as many as you like back to back, each one goes straight to the employee it's assigned to.
This matters most when something suddenly becomes urgent: a routine task queued for later in the week that now needs to happen today doesn't need to be recreated or reassigned, it just needs one click.
What makes this different from just moving a task up a priority list is that it actually wakes the employee. Reordering a queue is a suggestion an AI employee might get to eventually; Start Now is a direct instruction that begins the work the moment you click, the same as messaging the employee yourself and asking for it right now.
Start Now only appears on tasks assigned to an AI employee. A task assigned to a person on your team has no employee to hand it to, so the button doesn't show up there at all, there is nothing for it to do.
Start Now shares the exact same credit gate as your chat composer: out of credits, over the daily trial cap, or sitting without an active plan disables it with the same lock message you'd see there. A blocked click never spends anything, so the check happens before any work starts, not after.
The button also tells you who is about to start. Hovering it names the employee assigned to that card, so on a busy board you are never guessing which member of your workforce a click is about to wake. That small detail is what turns a play icon on a card into a decision you can make quickly and confidently, without opening the task first to check who owns it.
Left alone, tasks get worked in whatever order an employee's schedule reaches them. Start Now overrides that ordering for a single task without touching anything else on the board, everything else keeps running on its normal cadence.
It's available everywhere a task appears, the board, the list view, the detail drawer, so there's no separate place to go to use it.
It also disappears wherever it would not make sense. A task that is already completed, cancelled, failed, waiting on something, or archived carries no Start now button, and neither does a task you do not have permission to edit. You never get a control that looks live and then quietly does nothing, which is the usual way a board full of buttons stops being trustworthy.
Plans change mid-week more often than task lists admit. A report due Friday suddenly needs to exist for a call this afternoon, a task an employee was going to reach tomorrow needs to be done in the next hour. Start Now is built for exactly that shift: no editing due dates, no reassigning, no explaining why the urgency changed, just a click.
Start Now doesn't set a hidden flag on the task. It sends a real message into the employee's own chat thread that names the task by its exact ID and asks the employee to pick up that specific card, move it to In Progress, and take it through to done, the same as if you'd typed the request yourself.
You're then dropped straight into that thread, so you watch the work happen live instead of checking back on the board later. If the employee is already mid-task on something else, the request queues behind that work and begins the moment it clears, it never interrupts what's already running.
Start now hands the task to its employee with a message, not a flag
Clicking Start now sends a message to the assigned employee that names the task by its exact ID and asks it to pick up that specific card, move it to In Progress, and take it through to done. Binding to the task ID matters: it's what keeps the employee working the card you clicked instead of starting a fresh, duplicate one.
If the employee is already mid-task on something else, the request queues behind that work and begins the moment it's clear, it does not interrupt what's already running. Everything else on the board keeps its own schedule; Start now only changes the one task you clicked.
You never see the plumbing. In the thread, the reference to the card renders as a clickable task card rather than a block of technical text, so the message reads like something a person would write and the card is one click away if you want to open it. The request goes through the same path as anything you type into the chat box yourself, which is why the reply streams in live rather than appearing later as a finished block.
A task queued for later in the week now needs to exist for a call this afternoon. Instead of recreating it, editing its due date, or explaining the new urgency, you click Start now and the employee begins immediately.
You just created a task and want to check the employee's output before doing anything else. Start now skips the wait, so you can review the finished work in the same sitting instead of coming back to it later.
Open tasks accumulate faster than any one employee gets to them in a given day. When you notice one that should have already been picked up, Start now moves it forward without touching where anything else on the board sits.
You add a card to a teammate employee's board and want it moving now rather than whenever that employee next comes around to it. The button names who is about to start before you click, so you can hand off and trigger in the same moment without opening their board separately.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| A task you just wrote down waits for its employee to reach it in the normal run of the day. | One click hands that exact card to its employee and the work starts in front of you. |
| Making something urgent means editing the due date, reshuffling the board, or recreating the task somewhere more visible. | Nothing about the task changes and nothing else on the board moves; only the one card you clicked starts. |
| You ask for a task by name in chat and sometimes get a second copy of it instead of the card you meant. | The request carries the card's own identity, so the employee picks up the existing task and takes it through to done. |
| You trigger something and then keep going back to the board to find out whether anything actually happened. | You land in the employee's thread and watch the work stream as it happens, in the same sitting. |
No. It only affects the single task you clicked; everything else on the board keeps its normal schedule.
Yes, click Start now on as many tasks as you like, each one goes straight to its assigned employee.
No, it queues behind whatever the employee is actively working, then begins immediately once that's clear.
On the task board, in the list view, and inside the task's own detail panel, wherever you're already looking at the task.
No. The button only appears on tasks assigned to an AI employee, since a person's task has no employee to hand it to.
It's disabled with the same lock message your chat composer shows when credits, trial days, or your plan run out, so a blocked click never spends anything.
No, and the button is not shown there at all. Start now only appears on tasks that are still open and workable, so a completed, cancelled, failed, waiting, or archived task has no Start now control, and neither does a task you do not have permission to edit.
You are taken straight into the assigned employee's chat thread, where the request appears as a normal message with a clickable card for the task. The employee's reply streams in live in that same thread, so you can watch the work happen instead of going back to the board to check on it later.
Start a Task Now is part of How they coordinate as a team.
Run your AI workforce the way you run a good team. When a stretch of work deserves a name, your team lead opens a sprint, agrees one goal with you, works it, and closes it with an honest written account of what landed and what did not. Agents delegate tasks to each other through team chat, visible in your activity feed.