Multiple Timers: Running Several Clocks at Once

When one clock stops being enough

The multi-timer is for parallel measurements — several things running at the same time, each needing its own total. That is different from sequential measurement, where one thing follows another and a single clock with laps would do the job perfectly well.

A useful test: if you could measure everything with one stopwatch and a lap button, you do not need this tool. Laps handle segments that follow each other. What laps cannot handle is two segments overlapping — you cannot be on lap three of one activity and lap one of another at the same time.

• A freelancer moving between three clients in one afternoon, each needing its own billable total.
• A coach timing four athletes who start at different moments.
• A support desk tracking how long each of several open tickets has actually been worked on.
• Anyone cooking two dishes whose steps do not line up.

In every case the defining feature is the same: the clocks start and stop independently, and each total must stay separate to the end.

Name them before you start, not after

This is the single habit that decides whether the tool helps or hurts. Each timer takes a name and a colour, and both should be set before anything is running.

The reason is unglamorous: once four clocks are running, you will not stop to type. You will tell yourself you can remember which is which, and for about ten minutes you will be right. Then a phone call happens, and you come back to four anonymous counters with no way to tell which belongs to which client. The data is not wrong — it is unattributable, which is worse, because it looks usable.

Name them for what you will want to read later, not for what is obvious right now. "Client Dubois — revisions" survives the afternoon; "Timer 2" does not. The colour is a second, faster channel: at a glance across the room you read colour long before you read text, which is what makes a wall of clocks scannable instead of merely present.

Targets: what they do and do not do

Each timer can carry a target duration in minutes. The target is a reference point, not a limit: the clock does not stop when it is reached, and nothing is blocked. What you get is the ability to see, at a glance, which activities are inside their budget and which have quietly gone past it.

That distinction is what makes targets worth setting. A timer with no target tells you a duration; a timer with one tells you a duration and a judgement about it. Two hours on a task is a neutral fact until you remember you had allowed forty-five minutes for it.

Set targets from what you actually budgeted, not from what you hope. A target you know is fictional trains you to ignore the signal, and after a week of ignoring it you have simply added noise to the page.

Saving a set you will use again

Most people who need several timers need roughly the same several timers repeatedly. The same three clients, the same four stations, the same recurring blocks of a week. Rebuilding that arrangement from scratch every morning is the friction that makes people abandon the tool by Wednesday.

Saved timers persist between visits with their names, colours and targets, up to twelve. Twelve is a deliberate ceiling rather than a technical one: beyond about a dozen, a wall of clocks stops being something a person can actually read, and you would be better served by fewer, broader categories.

That last point is worth taking seriously. The temptation with a tool like this is to split work ever more finely — a timer per task rather than per project. Fine-grained data feels rigorous, but a page of fourteen clocks is one nobody scans, and untracked time is worse than coarsely tracked time.

Reading a wall of clocks

Every timer starts, pauses and resets on its own. Nothing is linked, which is the entire point — but it also means nothing stops on your behalf. The classic mistake is leaving a clock running on a task you abandoned two hours ago, then discovering an afternoon attributed to work you did not do.

The habit that prevents it: pause before you switch, not after you arrive. Pausing the clock you are leaving is a single deliberate action taken while the old task is still in your head. Remembering to pause it later, once you are already absorbed in something else, does not happen.

A running total is shown across all timers, which is the number worth watching at the end of a session — it answers "where did the afternoon actually go?" rather than "how long was this one thing?". It is also a quick sanity check: if the total is far short of the hours that passed, some of your time was never on any clock at all.

Saving the session

Timers are saved separately, each becoming its own entry in your history rather than one merged block. This is deliberate: a combined total would answer a question nobody asks. You want to know what went to each client, not what went to the afternoon.

Because each entry lands in the same history as every other tool, a week of multi-timer records sits alongside your stopwatch and Pomodoro sessions and can be read together. That is what makes the history worth keeping rather than nine separate silos.

Without an account the arrangement lasts for your visit; registering makes both the timers and their history permanent, and carries over what you set up as a visitor. If your work is a repeating sequence rather than parallel clocks — the same steps in the same order each time — the interval timer chains them automatically instead, and for two people alternating, the chess clock is the tool that links two clocks so one stops as the other starts.