sneaky way of working out when a task starts or ends in linux

Having decided there was no suitable way to get time stamps in linux commands, i looked around for alternatives. Now, linux has a somewhat nuanced way of chaining up tasks - using && for tasks that get run after another task sucessfully runs, ; for tasks that run after another task finishes and so on...

so date >> start.txt && task && date >> end.txt (i could use the same file, presumably) will let me know when a task started or ended.