Send one link before the call. Everyone counts down together, so finishing on time stops being one person's job.
Free for any number of people. Or run a timer just for yourself.
Meetings do not overrun because people are unaware of the time. They overrun because the only person tracking it is the one who would have to interrupt someone to say so. A countdown everybody can see moves that job off a person and onto a clock, which nobody argues with.
Give it a name if the room needs to know what the clock is for. Add a lead-in of a minute or two if people still have to open the link.
It is copied for you. Paste it in the chat, the calendar invite, the slide, or open it on the screen at the front of the room. There is no room code and nothing for anyone to join.
Every browser on the link reads the same countdown rather than keeping its own, so somebody who opens it late sees the time that is genuinely left. Pause it and the whole room stops; add five minutes and the whole room gets them.
Fifteen minutes is the format, not a suggestion. Put it in the invite and it holds.
One link per item, or restart between them. The topic that eats the hour becomes visible while there is still time to stop it.
Same length for every candidate, visible to both sides, which is fairer and calmer than a glance at a watch.
Timeboxing only works if the box is visible to the room rather than to the facilitator.
The countdown is kept by the server, and every screen in the room is reading it rather than running its own. That is what makes the next three true at once.
Pause, resume, add time or reset, and it lands on every screen within a couple of seconds. Not your copy of the timer, the timer.
Every reply carries the server’s own time, and each browser corrects for the gap. A laptop set four minutes fast still finishes with the room.
The controls belong to the browser that created the timer, never to the link. Thirty people can hold the link and none of them can stop the lesson.
And still: nobody signs in, there is no room to join and no code to type, no limit on how many people open it, and the only thing stored is a length and whatever you called it — deleted a day after the countdown ends.
The timer is free and always will be. What it cannot do is remember what the twenty minutes decided, or whose job the outcome became.
That is a shared workspace: goals, projects and tasks that belong to the group rather than to whoever created them, assignable to a person, with habits that keep a separate streak for everybody so nobody breaks anyone else’s. One subscription covers five people, and it is on your bill rather than theirs.
EvyOS holds the goals, projects, tasks and habits a shared workspace actually runs on. The timer stays free regardless.
Start for free →