The private school where I work near Chicago has a few thousand students, faculty, and staff. We also have bells. Loud bells. Everything in the school seems to be on a timer of some sort.
Teachers use timers in their classrooms. Faculty use timers for meetings and projects. Even I use a timer for various tasks and projects. Fortunately, iPhone and iPad users have a growing plethora of timer apps. Mac users? Not so much. And that’s where most of my workday is. On the Mac. Here’s a big countdown timer with a creative name.
Count Me Down, Baby
If you’re interested in improving productivity and you don’t mind having a time tell you what to do, you’ll like the Pomodoro Timer. But what I’m bring up today goes beyond a task manager timer. It’s called Big Countdown Timer. What you get is a countdown timer– perfect for counting down any task from a minute to 10 hours.
And it’s big. Very big.
See? Big. Bigger than big.
Big Countdown Timer is flexible big and stretches out to take up as much or as little window space on your Mac as you need. Set it big, big, bit so you can see it from across the room. Or, simply set it up as a smaller floating window and use it to time your work.
Using the app couldn’t be much easier, either.
The only buttons are Set, Start, and Reset. Set the timer for the amount of time to count down. That can be from one minute to 10 hours. Granted, I don’t know of an instance where you would need more than 10 hours– that’s a long, long day– but having a full 24-hour countdown would be beneficial.
Click the Start button to start the countdown. Click the Reset button to, well, I’m sure you have this figure out– to set the time back to whatever.
Big Countdown Timer is not completely devoid of features. It can also use multiple alarm sounds which activate when the set time is reached– the countdown. I’ve been using Big Countdown Timer for a day and while it’s simple to setup and use, it’s exactly the simplicity that helps you be more productive, ala the Pomorodo Technique, but without all the rules and rigmarole.
While Big Countdown Timer is simple and straightforward and won’t tax your brain to use, it could use a few additional functions, including the always use ‘always on top’ feature.’ As it is now, I can reduce the timer to a smaller size, but on my MacBook’s smaller screen it’s easy to have an open app overlap the timer. Also, I would prefer to have some custom sounds rather than use only the alert sounds in the Mac. The alarm needs to be distinct.
That said, Big Countdown Timer is useful right way and price exactly right.
