I'm not sure why. The snippets from the documentation work.

Hi @matta -how are you calling the task? If you're calling from outside of the context of a flow, you may need to use the task’s 

.run()

 function. There's potentially a similar issue and a bit of background in this thread: https://prefect-community.slack.com/archives/CL09KU1K7/p1584977234415200

I took the

task

decorator of some Helper functions that I was calling internally and that did the trick! Thanks!