The timer time-boxes an activity for the whole room. Set it going and a clock pill appears at the top of the canvas for every participant, ticking in sync. It comes in two flavours: a countdown for "you have five minutes", and a stopwatch for "let us see how long this takes".
Setting it up
Timer and Stopwatch live in the tab's menu under Collaborate, side by side with Vote and Poll.
Open the Timer category and pick a duration (1, 3, 5, or 10 minute presets), or open Stopwatch to count up from zero.
Use Start to begin. While it runs you can Pause and Resume, Reset back to the start, or Clear to remove the timer altogether.
While one runs, its category shows a live clock with a running or paused status, and a countdown adds a progress track. A tab runs one timer at a time: starting a countdown resets a running stopwatch and vice versa (the Start button warns you first). The timer is scoped to the tab, so each tab can have its own. Because it syncs like everything else, anyone who joins late or reloads sees the current time straight away rather than a fresh clock.
What everyone sees
The live clock shows as a floating pill near the top of the canvas, ticking smoothly while it runs. A countdown also drains: the pill starts fully tinted and empties from left to right as the time goes, so someone across the room can read how long is left without parsing the digits. It flashes when it reaches 0:00 so the room knows time is up. A stopwatch has no end to work towards, so it gets no fill. People with edit access get inline pause, resume, and reset controls on the pill itself; view-only visitors see the same clock as a read-only display.
The pill sits in the shared top row of floating controls, alongside things like mode banners and the selection toolbar, so it never overlaps them: to the right of them on desktop, and underneath on mobile.
How it stays in sync
Rather than sending a tick across the network every second, each participant's clock works out the time locally from a shared anchor point: the moment a countdown will end, or the instant a stopwatch started. Everyone computes the same value from that anchor, so the clock stays in step without constant network chatter. Pausing freezes the value, and resuming re-anchors it.
The clock is shared but not second-perfect across machines: tiny differences in device clocks are fine for a workshop timer. It is there to keep the room roughly together, not to referee a stopwatch race.
Was this article helpful?