It should be possible to use an event listener to automate starting a timer for a user when a task's status is set in progress. The reason that we don't do this automatically is that there can be several situations where you do not want the timer started automatically, and it is hard to know when this is.
An event listener is a small python script that can be used to subscribe to changes in ftrack and perform custom logic such as updating a status, starting a external process or triggering a user interface. Here are some useful resources for setting up an event listener:
* Developer hub with introduction to the API
* How to subscribe with the API
* Information about the update event
* Example event listeners
If you are not interested in logging time, but rather want to see how long a particular task has been in a certain state you can look at querying `Event` objects using the API. There is a snippet with some examples here. You probably want to query for action=change.status.task and parent_id=the task's id.
