Workshop Timer

What this is for

A projector-friendly countdown for the exercises that make up most design workshops. Pick a preset, press Start, and the room can see exactly how long is left without anyone needing to run it from a phone under the table.

The exercises

Crazy 8s

Eight sketches, one minute each, eight minutes total. The point is volume, not quality — a minute is deliberately too short to get precious about a single idea, which is what pushes people past their first, safest answer.

1-2-4-All

Four rounds of different lengths: a minute thinking alone, two minutes in pairs, four minutes in fours, five minutes sharing with the room. Starting alone stops the loudest voice in the room setting the agenda before anyone else has had a chance to form an opinion.

Silent brainstorming

Five minutes where everyone writes and nobody talks. It surfaces the same problem 1-2-4-All solves — a room where the first person to speak anchors everyone else — by removing speaking from the equation entirely.

Lightning demos

Three minutes each to show something worth stealing from — a competitor, a past project, an unrelated app that solved a similar problem well. Three minutes is short enough to keep the pace up across five or six demos in one sitting.

Dot voting

Five minutes to place votes on the options on the wall, with no discussion while the clock is running. Discussion before voting is where opinions get anchored; this keeps the vote a genuine read of the room.

Why the timer keeps time when the tab is hidden

Most countdown timers work by subtracting a fraction of a second every tick, which means a throttled or backgrounded browser tab — the most common thing that happens to a laptop during a workshop — makes them drift behind the real time. This one does not tick down at all. It reads the system clock and works out where the countdown ought to be right now, every time it renders. Switch away for two minutes and switch back, and it is exactly two minutes further along, not two minutes behind.

Frequently asked questions

Why did the chime not play?

Browsers block audio from playing until the page has been interacted with — press Start once and the chime will sound normally for every phase after that, including on later rounds.

Can I change the durations?

Choose a preset, then adjust the seconds per round and number of rounds underneath it. The URL updates as you change them, so you can bookmark or share your own variant of a preset.

Does it work on a projector?

Use Fullscreen to make the countdown fill the screen from across the room. The screen-wake request the timer makes while running also stops the display sleeping mid-round, which a projector left idle for a few minutes will otherwise do.