How Workflows Remember Progress

When a workflow run is executed in steps, each step’s result is remembered. If the workflow pauses — for example, to wait for your approval — it picks up exactly where it left off without redoing work.

How it works

When a workflow runs:

It starts from the beginning
For each step, it checks: “Have I done this before?”
If yes, it skips ahead using the saved result
If no, it runs the step and saves the result
If a step needs your approval, the workflow pauses
When you approve, the workflow resumes — skipping all the steps it already completed

This means your workflows are efficient (they never redo work) and resumable (approvals don’t lose progress).

A visual walkthrough

Why this matters

Your workflows are reliable. If something interrupts a workflow — an approval pause, a temporary error — it doesn’t start over from scratch. It picks up right where it left off.

Approvals don’t slow things down. If your workflow has 5 steps and step 3 needs approval, steps 1 and 2 won’t re-run after you approve. The workflow jumps straight to step 3.

Each run is independent. The saved progress is specific to each individual run. The next time the workflow triggers, it starts fresh.

Progress is saved per-run. Each time a workflow is triggered (by a new email, on a schedule, etc.), it starts fresh with no saved progress from previous runs.

Best practices

Keep steps focused. Each step should do one thing. This makes the saving and resuming more efficient — if step 3 fails, only step 3 needs to re-run, not a giant combined step.

Handle “nothing to do” cases. Always account for the possibility that there’s no data to process. For example, if your workflow searches for emails and finds none, it should handle that gracefully rather than failing.

Use descriptive step names. Steps are identified by name, so use names that describe what they do — like “gather emails,” “format summary,” and “send report.”

Combining Workflows — Delegating focused tasks across workflows