Meeting Timer

How it works

The Meeting Timer has two views that work together:

Full screen — massive countdown digits, color-coded background, designed to be visible from across the room. Use this when the phone is propped on a podium or table.
Mini pill — a compact floating bar pinned to the bottom of your screen. Stays visible while you review your comments, browse study material, or do anything else in the app. Tap it to expand back to full screen.

The timer keeps running no matter where you navigate in the app — and it keeps correct time even when you leave the browser entirely. See Leaving the timer running for exactly what happens when you switch apps, lock your phone, or close the tab.

Getting started

Open the timer

Go to Meeting Timer from the Explore menu (under Prepare) or navigate directly to /timer.

Pick a template

You'll see cards for each meeting template. Built-in templates include Midweek Meeting, Weekend Meeting, Study Group, and Quick Timer.

Each card shows the parts, their durations, and the total meeting time. Tap Start to begin timing immediately.

Or clone and customize

Tap Clone & Edit to create a copy for today's meeting. The editor lets you:

Rename parts — tap any part name to change it
Change durations — adjust the minutes for each part
Add or remove parts — use + Add Part or the × button
Reorder — use the up/down arrows to rearrange the schedule
Set a start time — enter when the meeting begins and see calculated end times for each part

The schedule bar at the top always shows the total duration and predicted end time. As you add, remove, or resize parts, the schedule updates instantly.

Tap Save to keep the template for future use, or just tap Start Timer to begin.

The full-screen timer

Once started, the timer fills the screen with a large countdown. The background color tells you how the part is going at a glance:

Green — more than half the time remaining. Relax.
Amber glow — between 25% and 50% remaining. Heads up.
Amber solid — less than 25% remaining. Time to wrap up.
Red — overtime. The timer crosses zero and counts up, showing exactly how far over. +0:45 means 45 seconds past the budget.

Controls at the bottom: Pause freezes the clock (tap again to resume). Next records the current part's time and advances to the next one.

Minimize to the pill

Tap Minimize (top-left) or press Esc to collapse the timer into the floating pill at the bottom of the screen. The pill shows:

Part name and countdown — always visible
Meeting total — "Part 3/10 · Meeting: 58:30" so you know how the overall meeting is tracking
Pause / Next — one-tap controls right on the pill, no need to expand

Now you can navigate anywhere — review your comments on the dashboard, look up a Bible verse, check your outline — and the pill stays pinned at the bottom, counting down.

Tap the pill to go back to full screen anytime.

Meeting summary

After the last part (or if you tap End Meeting), you'll see a summary table showing each part's budgeted time, actual time, and the difference. Parts that ran over are flagged.

Tap Save to store the session for future reference, or Done to dismiss.

Leaving the timer running

Meetings do not wait for you to keep the right tab in front. You will switch to your notes, answer a message, let the phone screen lock, or walk away from the laptop for a moment. The timer is built so that none of that costs you accuracy.

Why web timers usually drift — and why this one doesn't

Most timers on the web count seconds as they go by: every second that passes, add one. That works only for as long as the browser keeps ticking. The moment a tab moves to the background, browsers deliberately slow those ticks down — often to roughly one a minute — to save battery, and on iPhones and iPads they stop them altogether when you switch apps or the screen locks. A timer built that way quietly loses every tick it never received. It doesn't pause and it doesn't warn you. It just runs slow, and you find out afterwards that your twelve-minute part was really eighteen.

This timer never counts ticks. It records the clock time your part started and, whenever it needs to show a number, subtracts that from the current clock time. Being backgrounded, throttled, or frozen for twenty minutes changes nothing, because the answer is worked out fresh from the clock rather than added up along the way. The digits refresh four times a second while you are watching, but that is only for the display — the elapsed time is right whether that refresh happened or not.

What survives what

Switching to another app — keeps exact time. The moment you come back the reading is already correct; there is no visible catching-up.
Locking your phone — keeps exact time, including on iPhone and iPad where the browser is fully suspended.
Another window on top of the browser — keeps exact time. This is the case most web timers get wrong, because the tab technically never became "hidden".
Switching tabs — keeps exact time.
Refreshing the page — resumes exactly where it should be, including any time that passed during the reload.
The browser crashing, or the tab being dropped to free memory — resumes when you reopen the page. Phones drop background tabs routinely; that is expected, not a failure.
Several tabs open at once — they stay in sync. Pause in one and the others pause too; you will never have two tabs disagreeing about the same meeting.
Your device's clock correcting itself — the countdown never jumps backwards.

The screen stays awake while the timer runs, so a phone propped on the podium won't dim mid-part. If something else takes that hold away — a call, another app — the timer takes it back as soon as you return.

The one judgment call: long absences

Counting clock time is the right answer for the absences that actually happen during a meeting. It becomes the wrong answer at the extremes. If you close the laptop after a meeting and open it the next morning without ending the timer, strict clock time would greet you with fourteen hours of overtime on a five-minute part — technically accurate, completely useless.

So the timer notices how long the page was actually away, and treats three cases differently:

Up to 30 minutes away — counted in full. You stepped out; the meeting carried on.
30 minutes to 8 hours — the timer comes back paused, holding the last time it can vouch for, and says so plainly: "this page was away for about 2 hours, so that time was not counted." Tap Resume to carry on, or End Meeting for the summary. It will never invent a number it can't stand behind.
More than 8 hours — treated as abandoned and cleared, so yesterday's forgotten meeting doesn't greet you today.

Worth knowing

Nothing alerts you while you are away. The time stays right, but a part going overtime while you are in another app will not buzz, ring, or notify. You see the correct overtime when you come back. If you are chairing, keep the timer in view.
Quitting the browser completely stops the clock. No web page can keep counting once the browser is closed — but the timer's starting point is saved, so reopening the page picks the meeting back up under the rules above.
The timer lives in this browser, on this device. It is not synced to your account, so starting a timer on your phone will not show it on your laptop.
Private browsing still works — but because private windows discard their storage on close, a timer started there won't survive the window closing.

Tips

Keyboard shortcuts in full screen: Space = pause/resume, → = next part, Esc = minimize to pill.
Screen stays on — the timer automatically prevents your phone from sleeping while it's running.
Leave it running — switch apps, lock the phone, refresh the page. The timer reads the clock rather than counting ticks, so the time is right when you come back. See Leaving the timer running.
Prop it up and walk away — because backgrounding is safe, you can start the timer on a second device, minimize it, and still use that phone for something else.
Chairman tip — clone a template before each meeting and adjust for that week's assignments. Set the start time to see when each part should begin and end.
Speaker tip — minimize the timer and review your comment while the pill counts down at the bottom.
Quick Timer — need to time just one thing? Use the Quick Timer template — it's a single part with an adjustable duration.