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A task is where the work actually happens in Cowork: one private conversation between you and a worker (or a bare model, if you skip the worker) that can read files, run code, and call connections until the job is done.

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What a task is

Think of a task as a single chat thread with a to-do attached to it. Every task belongs to exactly one person — the workspace member who started it — and it stays theirs for its whole lifetime. A task is the run record, separate from the worker, which is the reusable, durable definition (instructions, skills, assets, and connections) a task can run inside of. See Core concepts for how the two fit together, and Workers for what a worker is made of.

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Worker-bound vs. worker-less tasks

There are two ways to start a task, and where you click determines what it inherits: A worker-less task (sometimes called a workspace task) is the equivalent of opening a fresh chat — useful for one-off work that doesn’t need a dedicated worker. A worker-bound task instead runs as that worker, with everything it knows and can do already loaded.
Both kinds of task run in the same cowork session and are private to you either way — attaching a worker changes what the task can do, not who can see it.

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Task lifecycle

A task moves through a small set of plain-language states:
Done isn’t a dead end. Send a finished task a new message and it picks the same conversation back up, with all its history and files intact — you never need to start a new task just to continue one.

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The cowork session

Opening a task puts you in the cowork session — a two-pane view built around the conversation:
  • Chat (left) — the spine of the task. You and the worker talk through the goal, and its steps (files touched, code run, connections called) appear inline as plain-language lines, not a raw terminal feed.
  • Files & preview panel (right) — a live view of the task’s own files as the worker creates and edits them, with previews and an inline editor for common types like text, code, images, and spreadsheets.
The panel and the loop behind the chat are covered in depth elsewhere:

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Privacy

A task is visible only to the person who started it — never to other workspace members, and never automatically to an admin. This is the one place Cowork’s default openness stops: workers, their skills, and workspace-scoped files are shared with everyone in the workspace, but a task and its task-scoped files belong to its owner alone.

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Where tasks live: the list, and the board to come

Your tasks live on the Tasks home — a single list, newest activity first, with a pinned needs you group above your recent tasks so the ones waiting on you never get buried.
A Kanban-style board view — swimlanes per worker, work-in-progress limits, drag-to-update — is on the roadmap as a richer, optional view over the same tasks. It isn’t available today; the list is the current home for every task, worker-bound or not.

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Next steps

Execution, sandbox & files

See where a task’s code runs and how its files are kept in sync.

The agentic loop

Follow what happens on each turn a worker takes inside a task.

Human-in-the-loop

Understand approvals and the “needs you” state in detail.

Workers

See what a worker brings to the tasks it runs.