Working with your Agent

Once your Agent is connected to AbleTime, your task list is something you can talk to. In this guide you run a working day from the chat window: find your work, start it, hit a snag, finish something, and account for the day at the end, without opening the app once. If your Agent isn't connected yet, start with Connecting Your Agent.

Start the day

Ask what's waiting:

You:    What's on my plate today?

Agent:  You have three active tasks:
        - AP-27 Build Orchestration — doing, critical, 9.5 hours logged this week
        - AAP-42 Survey calendar import — todo, due today
        - AAP-9 Client onboarding checklist — todo, currently blocked
        AAP-42 is due today and not started; that's the obvious pick.

The Agent answers from AbleTime: your assigned tasks, their states, and the time already against them. The references (AP-27, AAP-42) are the handles you'll use in every instruction that follows.

Pick up a task

Ask for the detail, then start:

You:    What's AAP-42 actually about?

Agent:  AAP-42 — Survey calendar import. The description says: map how
        imported calendar events land, what survives a re-import, and which
        ones stay active. No time logged yet.

You:    Right, I'm starting on it now.

From that point the Agent keeps a draft time entry in the background: the minutes, when you started, a short description of the work, and AAP-42 as the task it advanced. Drafts are private to you and don't become recorded time until they're accepted, so nothing shows in reports while you're still mid-flight.

When something's in the way

Tell the Agent why you're stopping and it parks the task for you:

You:    I can't go further until the import format is signed off. Block
        AAP-42 and note what it's waiting for.

Agent:  Done. AAP-42 is marked blocked with the note "Waiting on the import
        format sign-off." It stays on the board, flagged, so the team can see
        it's held up. Your draft for this morning — 85 minutes — is closed.

Finish something

Marking work done runs into the board's rules, and the Agent explains them instead of working around them:

You:    The format is signed off, it's resolved. Unblock AAP-42 and mark
        it done.

Agent:  Unblocked. AAP-42 can't be marked done yet: it has no recorded time,
        and a task only reaches done once time is on the record. Your 85-minute
        draft from this morning covers the work — should I accept it?

You:    Yes, accept it and mark the task done.

Agent:  Accepted 85 minutes against AAP-42; it moved through doing and is
        now done.

That refusal is the same rule the board enforces everywhere: a task reaches doing through time recorded against it, and done requires that time on the record. The Agent can accept its own drafts, and only its own; anything anyone else drafted waits for its owner.

Some tasks never carry time of their own — a duplicate, or a piece of work that was done under another task in the same project. You can still close one: tell the Agent which task did the work, and it closes the empty task against that one, with a note saying so.

Close the day

You:    Where did my day go?

Agent:  4h 40m recorded today:
        - AAP-42 — 85m, accepted, task done
        - AP-27 — 2h 15m across two entries, accepted
        - 60m without a task: the planning call. Want that against Overhead?
        One draft is still open on AP-27 from the last hour — accept it, or
        leave it for review in the morning?

Loose ends surface on their own: unaccepted drafts, and time that hasn't found its task. Answer, or leave them for the app; drafts keep until you review them. For the week or the month as a page of Report Cards rather than a chat reply, the Agent can hand you a report link; see Intelligence Reports with Your Agent.

What to expect between the lines

Name tasks by reference when you can. When an instruction is ambiguous — a title that matches two tasks, work with no obvious home — the Agent asks once rather than guessing, because once it is recorded, a guessed detail looks exactly like a real one. Every tool behind this conversation is described on MCP Tools, and the draft-and-acceptance flow in full is on Time / Task Manager.