The original post's disqus can't be loaded, so I'm posting it here: I have noticed that Gulp's watch task's time reporting is a bit misleading. For an async Gulp task to be accurately timed, you need to either take a callback argument or return a stream/promise. When you do none of these, the task is considered done the moment it's returned, resulting in the microseconds time reported during watch - it is not how long it actually took to finish the task.