# Background tasks

The notch's **Tasks** tab shows work delegated to background workers. This lets you ask another question without treating every piece of work as a new blocking conversation. Available concurrency and capabilities depend on your build and account; background work does not mean a cloud computer is available.

## Read the status

- **Working:** the task is still running. Open it for activity rather than launching a duplicate.
- **Needs your approval:** inspect and answer the pending request.
- **Complete:** open the result and verify the requested outcome.
- **Needs attention:** read the error or incomplete result before deciding whether to retry.

Select an item for details and use **All tasks** to return to the list. A task that requires a connected service may remain blocked even though ordinary chat works.

## Stop deliberately

Use the task's own stop control, especially for [coding work](/nock/coding-agents). Stopping speech, collapsing the notch, hiding a browser, or asking a different question is not equivalent to cancelling a worker.

Cancellation cannot undo external actions already completed. If a task sent, created, or changed something, verify that state in the destination service before retrying.

## Keep work separate

Give each task a clear target and result. For coding, avoid simultaneous edits to the same project files. For connected apps, check whether a previous attempt already completed before asking again.

Local background workers require the relevant local runtime. Do not assume work will continue with the app quit or the computer asleep. Public cloud-agent availability is a separate launch gate described in [Availability](/nock/availability).

See [The notch](/nock/notch), [Usage and limits](/nock/usage-limits), and [Coding permissions](/nock/coding-permissions).