---
title: "Every Task Now Keeps Its Own Timeline | AgentRQ Blog"
url: https://agentrq.com/blog/task-status-history-timeline-for-ai-agent-tasks
description: "AgentRQ now records every task status change and draws it as a timeline: time worked, time blocked, time waiting on you, and start to close."
---

[Back to Blog](https://agentrq.com/blog/)

September 27, 2026 | AgentRQ Team

# Every Task Now Keeps Its Own Timeline

An agent finishes a task and marks it completed. You look at it the next morning. It took... how long, exactly?

Until now, AgentRQ could not tell you. A task kept one thing: its current status. When it moved from ongoing to blocked to ongoing to completed, each change overwrote the last. The end state was right, and everything in between was gone. You could not say how long the work took, how long the agent sat blocked, or how long it spent waiting for you to click Allow on a permission request.

That changes today. Every task now keeps the history of its status, with a time on every change, and the task page draws it as a timeline.

## What You See on the Task Page

Under the task description there is now a [task timeline](https://agentrq.com/features/task-timeline): a row of coloured dots, one per state the task has been in: not started, ongoing, blocked, needs input, completed, rejected or [scheduled](https://agentrq.com/features/task-scheduling). The time spent in each state is written on the line between two dots.

![A completed AgentRQ task with its timeline under the description: not started 6m, ongoing 24m, needs input 8m, ongoing 31m, blocked 38m, ongoing 19m, completed. The totals above read worked 1h 14m, blocked 38m, needs input 8m, start to close 2h](https://agentrq.com/assets/blog/task-status-timeline-completed.png)

That task tells a story you could not have read before. The agent worked for 1h 14m in total. Along the way it spent 8 minutes waiting on a question to the person, and 38 minutes blocked. From the first moment of work to completion took 2 hours. The row above the dots adds it up: **worked**, **blocked**, **needs input** and **start to close**.

The colours carry the meaning. Blocked stretches are red. Needs-input stretches are yellow. The current state pulses, and its time keeps counting live while you watch.

![An ongoing task in dark mode, waiting on a permission request. The timeline ends on a pulsing yellow](https://agentrq.com/assets/blog/task-status-timeline-needs-input-dark.png)

Here the agent is still working and has just asked for permission to run a command. The last dot is yellow and counting. Start to close is missing from the totals, because the task has not closed yet.

On a phone, the timeline shrinks to a single line: the dots and the total time, above the conversation.

![Two phone screenshots side by side. Left, light mode: a single-line timeline ending on a yellow needs-input dot at 4m, total 45m, above a permission request. Right, dark mode: a completed task's single-line timeline, total 2h](https://agentrq.com/assets/blog/task-status-timeline-mobile.png)

## Needs Input Is a State of the History Only

The yellow state deserves a closer look, because it is new and it works differently from the others.

When an agent asks you something through AgentRQ, such as a permission request or a form question, the task is waiting on you. That is a different kind of wait from blocked, and it is worth measuring on its own. So while any question in the task's thread is still pending, the history records the task as **needs input**, and when the last one is answered it moves back.

The task's own status never changes for this. It stays ongoing. Queues, counts, filters and the agents themselves see exactly the same status as before, so nothing else behaves differently. The needs-input state exists only in the timeline and in the totals.

## The Conversation Got Quieter

Before, every status change dropped a "Status updated to …" line into the task conversation. On a busy task those lines piled up between the messages that mattered. They are gone now, because the timeline shows the same information in one place, with times attached.

## What This Unlocks

**You can finally answer "how long did that take?"** Start to close is recorded per task, from the first time it went ongoing to the time it was completed or rejected. That is the number you want when you are deciding whether a class of work is worth handing to an agent at all, and until now it did not exist anywhere.

**You can tell the agent's time from your time.** A task that took two hours might have been two hours of work, or twenty minutes of work and an hour and forty minutes waiting for someone to click Allow. Those call for opposite fixes. The first means the task is big. The second means you are the bottleneck, and the answer is a broader permission, a better prompt, or a different time to hand it off. Worked, blocked and needs input are now separate numbers, so you can see which one you are looking at.

**Blocked stops being invisible.** An agent that sets a task to blocked is telling you it cannot go on without you. Before, you saw that only if you happened to look while it was true. Now every blocked stretch stays on the record in red, with its length, after it is over. A workspace where agents keep getting blocked for 40 minutes at a time has a problem worth fixing, and now it shows.

## Across a Whole Workspace

These numbers are per task. The workspace and account stats pages now chart them too: the typical, shortest and longest start to close, worked, blocked and needs-input times, so you can see how a whole workspace spends its time instead of one task at a time. See [Task Latency on the stats pages](https://agentrq.com/blog/task-latency-statistics-for-ai-agent-workspaces).

## FAQ

**Do existing tasks get a timeline?** From their next status change on. History that was never recorded cannot be rebuilt, so an older task shows only what happened after the update.

**Does "needs input" change a task's status?** No. It exists only in the history, so queues, counts and agents see the same status as before.

**Is it on mobile?** Yes, as a single line: the dots plus the total time.

## Try It

It shipped in [agentrq/agentrq#756](https://github.com/agentrq/agentrq/pull/756), and the [Task Timeline feature page](https://agentrq.com/features/task-timeline) has the short tour. Open any task that has changed status since the update, and look under the description.