Long-Running Notion Agents: Designing Mid-Task Checks, Stops, and Handoffs

What Notion announced: long-running Agents

In its release notes dated October 19, 2026, Notion said its Agents can work on a task for up to 24 hours. Notion’s official blog post from the same day says Agents can now work on a single task for more than 24 hours.

Because the official materials phrase this differently, this article does not treat 24 hours as a fixed technical limit. Being able to run for a long time also does not guarantee that every task will run for 24 hours, or that it will finish safely without anyone watching.

This article uses the long-running capability as a starting point for thinking about how to design mid-task checks, stops, and handoffs. First, here is what Notion has published.

• Long-running work: Agents can now work on a single task for a long time, according to Notion.
• A dedicated computer and browser: Agents can now use their own computer and browser.
• Improved context management: Notion says the way Agents handle context over long tasks has improved.
• “Review for me”: Introduced as a new mode with safety checks.
• Consolidated credits: AI usage is being brought under a new credit system.

What Notion’s official materials say about “Review for me” and approval settings

According to Notion’s official blog, “Review for me” uses a separate model to check whether an action is safe before the agent takes it. Notion’s help center lists three approval modes for Notion Agent: “Always ask,” “Review for me,” and “Skip all approvals,” with “Review for me” as the default.

The help center says that in “Review for me” mode, actions are reviewed automatically, and if an action is flagged as potentially unsafe, the agent pauses and asks the user first. It also notes that the automatic review will not always flag the same things a person would.

This description alone does not tell us whether the review covers a company’s reconciliation criteria or internal approval requirements. Compare the checks your business requires with those the product performs.

Notion Agent and Custom Agents also differ in permissions and approval settings, so confirm which type you use and how it is configured. According to the help center, Notion Agent has the same permissions as the user, while each Custom Agent has its own permissions and approval settings.

This article does not cover how to use Notion, differences between plans, credit pricing, or spending limits for AI usage. When evaluating the product, check Notion’s current documentation for feature details and availability.

What to check during long tasks

How you check an agent’s work should depend not only on run time but on the actions it takes along the way and the impact of a mistake. For work that only reads data and produces drafts, one option is to rely on automated checks along the way and a review once the task is complete. When the work involves sending information outside the company or changing source data, make sure the necessary checks can happen before those actions are carried out.

With that in mind, consider how the product’s safety checks relate to the company’s own checks. MIF recommends defining the checks the business needs, using the product’s settings where they help, and covering the gaps with operating procedures and controls on the connected systems.

For example, “Review for me” can be used as a mechanism that pauses actions flagged as potentially unsafe and asks the user for confirmation. Business checks such as “Does this reconciliation result meet our criteria?” are not necessarily what the product’s safety checks evaluate. Those checks are put in place through how the work is split up, approval settings, permissions on connected systems, and internal procedures.

Before starting: required checks, stopping procedures, and review responsibilities

Before assigning a long-running task to an agent, define three things:

• Required checks: What must be verified before each action, and what conditions allow work to continue or require it to be put on hold?
• Stopping procedures: What should stop, under which conditions, and who can stop it? How will the state of the work be checked afterward?
• Review responsibility: Who reviews the results and decides whether the task meets the business’s completion criteria?

A worked example (hypothetical): reconciling supplier invoices with payment records at month-end

Suppose you ask an agent to work overnight at month-end, reconciling invoices received from suppliers against the company’s payment records and listing discrepancies and items that could not be matched.

The agent is not given permission to change the original invoice or payment records, to send anything to suppliers, or to make payments. Any follow-up contact or payments needed after the results are reviewed are handled by staff under existing internal procedures. No one is available to respond overnight; if a situation requires human judgment, the work is put on hold and reviewed the next morning.

The workflow below is a hypothetical example proposed by MIF. We have not verified that it can be implemented in Notion.

Stage	What to review	Example checks and controls
Before starting	Period covered, records to reconcile, reconciliation criteria, output location, and completion criteria	A designated staff member confirms the task requirements and permissions. Changes to source data and payments remain out of scope
Trial on a subset of the data	Sample reconciliation results and references to the source records	The reviewer checks how the agent interpreted the data and applied the reconciliation criteria, then decides whether to start the full run
Overnight full run	Number of items processed, retrieval failures, unmatched items, and any work outside the defined scope	Record status, pause work, and send notifications according to predefined rules. If human judgment is required, do not proceed until the designated person authorizes continuation
Next-morning review	Processing status, results, unprocessed items and items on hold, source references, and processing records	The reviewer checks what was completed and what is on hold, then decides whether the completion criteria have been met or whether work needs to resume or undergo further review. Any follow-up contact or payments are handled by staff under existing procedures

Adjust the review points and conditions for pausing to suit your operations, the data involved, the potential impact, and your risk tolerance.

Ensure work pauses while required checks are pending

Define the required checks and who performs them. Then use approval settings, separate tasks, and permissions in connected systems to make those checks part of the workflow.

In the example above, splitting the trial on a subset of the data and the full run into separate tasks lets the reviewer check the work in between. If changing source data or making payments is not allowed, restrict those actions through permissions on the connected systems and confirm that they actually cannot be carried out. Test the workflow to verify that it does not proceed until the required checks and approvals are complete.

Candidate points for checks are natural breaks in the work and the moments before high-impact actions. Where needed, combine these with limits on elapsed time or the number of items processed. If errors in how the data is being read are caught at the first break, it becomes easier to avoid wasting all the work that follows.

Evaluate the design and effectiveness of human review

Combining people and AI does not always lead to better performance. In a 2024 meta-analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour, Vaccaro, Almaatouq, and Malone found that, on average, human–AI combinations outperformed humans alone but fell short of the better-performing standalone approach—humans alone or AI alone.

The study did not assess the frequency or placement of checks in long-running agent workflows. We use its findings as background for considering how human reviews are conducted and whether they are effective.

If checkpoints are added without making clear what the reviewer should look at to make a decision, the checks can become a formality. MIF recommends defining the purpose of each checkpoint, the information reviewers need, and the conditions for continuing or pausing, rather than starting by reducing the number of checks.

• Set the purpose: Make clear what the check is meant to prevent.
• Prepare the materials: Provide an overview of results, differences, and items on hold, with links to source materials and processing records.
• Make the criteria concrete: Instead of asking “Is this OK?”, check “Does this meet these conditions?”

Consolidate duplicate checks, but keep the approvals the business needs. Revisit the split between automated processing and human checks based on operating experience. To make that possible, record what was reviewed, the decision made, and the reasons for it.

Decide how to stop and resume, and who is responsible

Stopping: confirm what each control actually stops

For each type of agent you use, check whether you can stop work in progress, prevent future runs, or block access to connected systems—and what each control affects.

For Custom Agents, Notion’s help center explains how to stop automated runs by disabling triggers from the admin settings, and how to change or remove an agent’s access. The help center also says that changing approval settings does not undo anything the agent has already done.

Within the official materials we reviewed for this article, we did not find a detailed explanation of how to stop a task partway through, or of the state the work is left in afterward. If you are evaluating the product, check the latest official materials and the actual interface.

If you revoke permissions or disconnect a system to stop work, verify exactly what those actions stop. Check changes that have already been made, requests already sent to external systems, and scheduled future runs separately.

Resuming: decide what to continue and what to redo

Partial output may remain even when the system has not saved the state needed to resume. If the results from the last review contain errors, review the affected work before resuming.

Before restarting, check the last reviewed results, the work already completed, what remains, and any changes to input data or permissions. Then decide where to resume or which work needs to be redone.

If the system supports resuming an interrupted task, check that doing so will not repeat work already completed.

Responsibility: decide who handles what, and who covers when they are away

If no one is assigned to review the result, the output of a long task can sit there unreviewed. Record the role responsible for reviewing results, the person assigned to it, and their backup. If the person who responds to problems during the run differs from the person who reviews the result afterward, record both.

As in the example above, some operations may have no one available to respond overnight. In that case, define a rule that pauses work whenever human judgment is required and keeps it on hold until someone can review it.

In a small company, the same person may be the requester, the approver, and the reviewer. Even then, noting which role you were acting in and what you checked makes it easier to look back later.

A likely objection: “The value is in letting it run. Adding checks defeats the purpose.”

It is a fair point that the value lies in work moving forward without someone watching the screen all the time, and adding too many checks erodes that value.

We believe AI should handle the work it is equipped to do, with people working alongside it to improve the results. We recommend confirming that the necessary checks actually take place, and then cutting duplicate checks and unnecessary waiting. Verifying in advance that work can be put on hold and that notifications are sent when needed can reduce the need for continuous monitoring.

Summary

Before assigning a long-running task to an agent, MIF recommends defining the necessary checks based on the information involved, the permitted actions, and the potential impact of errors—not just the task’s duration.

Set completion criteria, conditions for continuing or pausing, stopping procedures, and responsibility for reviewing the results. Use the product’s safety checks and approval features, and test that work pauses when required.

After stopping, review what has been completed and what remains before deciding whether to resume, redo affected work, or hand it over to the designated person.

The aim is not simply to add or remove checks, but to make sure required checks take place and problems can be addressed without continuous human monitoring.

Start with one task and adapt the example table to your requirements and assigned roles. Resolve any undefined requirements or unassigned responsibilities before starting.

Sources and scope

This article is based primarily on Notion’s release notes (dated October 19, 2026), Notion’s official blog post from the same day, and the Notion help center articles “Choose how Notion Agent asks for your approval,” “Get started with Notion Agent,” and “Custom Agents sharing & permissions,” reviewed as of October 26, 2026.

Descriptions of long-running work, the dedicated computer and browser, “Review for me,” approval settings, and permissions are based on Notion’s own descriptions; MIF LLC has not independently verified how these features work or how effective they are. Availability, eligible plans, and feature details may change. Before use, check Notion’s latest official materials and terms of service.

The research cited is Vaccaro, Almaatouq, and Malone, “When combinations of humans and AI are useful: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” Nature Human Behaviour, 2024.

The suggested checks and table reflect MIF’s analysis and recommendations. The invoice reconciliation scenario is hypothetical and is included for illustration.