A telic situation is a situation with a natural endpoint.
A situation that is not telic is called "atelic." Telic situations are typically identified by cooccurrence with certain times adverbial expressions such as "in three hours", or "it took three hours", but these do not occur in all languages in the way they occur in English and other European languages. As noted by Boland (2006: 39), the best test is to ask the question: "If X is interrupted in the course of VERB-ing, has she then VERB-ed?" With telic events the answer is no, whereas with atelic events the answer is yes.
telic (SEM) = an event in which the relevant participant ends up in a “natural” result state. Example: in I crossed the street, the natural result state is reaching the other side of the street, and the event is telic. (Section 6.2.1)