20 Tips For Using Timers On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for setting and using timers on your Mac.

Now to start a timer on your Mac you use the Clock App. I'm going to use Spotlight to find and launch Clock and then at the top I'm going to switch to Timers. Here I've got a time here in hours, minutes, & seconds. You can click on anyone of these and type. You can also use the Up & Down Arrow Keys to adjust each of these numbers. You can set the sound that will be played when the Timer is finished and then simply click Start and the Timer will begin. 

To monitor a Timer while it's running, you can see the time right here in the Clock App, but you don't need to keep the Clock App running for the Timer to stay. You can Quit the Clock App completely and the Timer keeps going. As a matter of fact here in the Menu Bar you'll see the Timer right there. You can relaunch the Clock App or you can click here and go right to Timers and then you can also monitor here with this large readout. Note also here just above you see the time at which this Timer will end. You can Pause and then later Resume and this would update with the new time as well. To Stop a Timer you just click Cancel. 

Now if you want to reuse a Timer, like for instance let's say that sometimes you like to write for 15 minutes. So you can use this 15 minute timer. If you name it here, by clicking on this field and typing like that to give it a name, then Start it, then you'll see the name here. You can actually edit it while the Timer is running. But the important thing is by naming it, it now has added itself to the Recent List. You can see it there. So you can easily reuse this Timer by selecting it there or selecting it here as well. 

Now whether you use a name or not you can have multiple Timers going at the same time. So if you want to start a 15 minute timer and then realize you also want to remember to do something, say, an hour from now, you can click the Plus button here, create a new Timer, I'm going to set this for one hour, I'm going to Tab to the next field and type zero there, set a different sound for this and start it. You can see the inter-face changes now to show you the two timers here at the top. You can start more timers than this as well. Each one shows you the time where it will end and you can Pause or Cancel that timer, like that.

It really helps to set names for the Timers when you're doing multiples so you remember what each one is for.

Now in addition to being able to set a Timer and have it play a sound you can also choose to have a Timer stop playing. What that means is that music from the Music App or a podcast in the Podcast App or an Audio Book in the Books App or many other different audio apps will just stop when the timer gets to the end. So you can use this as a Sleep Timer. You can have music play and then automatically turn off after an hour. 

Now another way to start a Timer is to use Spotlight. Use Command Space or you can click on the Magnifying Glass here. Then look for the Action, Start Timer. If you go to Actions, by using Command 3 or clicking here you'll actually see it as probably one of the suggestions. But you could also just type it and get to it like that. Notice that there are Quick Keys that you can set here and I have this set to ST. So I could, instead of typing Start Timer I can just type ST and then return. Then it is going to prompt me for the duration. So I'm going to say 13 and I could Tab to the next field and then use the Arrow Keys to select something besides minutes. I'll stick with minutes here and then press Return to execute it. It doesn't even launch the Clock App but you can see here in the Menu Bar the timer has started. If I go to the Clock App you can see that it is running. 

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Now another way to start a Timer that's not quite as useful is to use Control Center. You go to Control Center here and then Edit Controls. Go to Clock and you can add Timer to the Controls. You can click the Plus Button and Add to Control Center or Add to Menu Bar or just drag it over. So let's add it in both places here. So now I have a handy button that I can click and it is just going to launch the Clock App and take me right to Timers. That's why it is not quite as useful. You can't even set the time. It is just a quick way to get to the Clock App. 

Much more useful is using Siri to do it. So you can activate Siri. I'll click on the Siri button here and you can just speak to Siri or in this case I've got Siri set to type to it to make it easier to show in these tutorials. You can just say something like, timer 14 minutes, like that. Then Siri is going to start the timer and it is going to show you it right here. You can even just Pause it right away. But you can also go into the Clock App and see that it is running. One of the great things about this method is you can name your Timers using Siri. Something you can't do with Spotlight. So I'm going to type, 10 minute timer named take a break. You can see the name right there and if I click here or click in the Menu Bar to go to it you can see it properly named the timer. So now I can add multiple timers that way, each with a name so I can recognize what I'm supposed to do when the time is up. 

Now in addition to being able to Start a Timer in Siri you can also control it. So, for instance, I can tell Siri to Pause the timer and you can see it is paused. I can tell it to Resume the Timer and it resumed. If I'm using my voice this is even easier. I can also tell it to Restart the timer and you can see there it goes back to its 15 minutes. I can tell it to Stop the Timer. Another cool thing you can do with Siri is you can have it set a timer for a specific time. Like, for instance, my clock right now shows 11:23. Let's say I want a timer to go till 11:45. I can calculate the number of minutes and all of that but Siri can do it for me. I can just type something like that and you can see it set a timer for 21 minutes and 30 something seconds. In fact if you ask Siri to set an alarm, but for a certain time from now, it doesn't set an alarm. It actually starts a timer. So if I say something like this it is going to set it up and notice it set a Timer. If I go to the Clock App there's a timer running. No alarm actually set. 

Now another way to start a timer is using the Shortcuts App. I'll launch Shortcuts here and I want to create a new shortcut. If I scroll down under Apps and go to Clock I will see that I have the ability to Start a Timer. So I'll add this and I can start the timer and put a number here, like ten, and I can use minutes, seconds, or hours. I can then name it something like, ten minute timer. Now if I run this shortcut it starts the timer there. It does it rather quietly. You can use Spotlight now to Search for this shortcut and launch it there, even adding Quick Keys.

Now if you want a button on the screen that's starts a timer for a specific time, this is how you do it because with Shortcuts you can go to File, then Add to Dock. Now we'll add this as an icon right here, ten minute timer, that I can click and it will run. You can also go to Control Center, Edit Controls here, and then Search for Shortcuts. Then select Run Shortcut. Going to add that to the Control Center but you can add it to the Menu Bar as well. Then I have to choose the shortcut. So I'm going to choose that, ten minute timer shortcut that I just created. You can see it is added there. So now I can use Control Center to start a ten minute timer or I could have put that in the Menu Bar and use the Menu Bar to start a ten minute timer. 

You could also go back to the Shortcut here and instead of saying ten minutes you can erase this. I'm going to Control Click in it and change it to; insert variable ask each time. Now when I run this shortcut it's going to ask for the duration. So now I can trigger that with the Dock or with Control Center and I can change the time to, let's say 15 minutes. You can see now it starts a 15 minute timer..

Now you may have noticed that unfortunately you can't create multiple timers with different labels. As a matter of fact if you tried to do, two Start timers with shortcut, it won't work. But you can set alarms. Since Shortcuts allows you to play with durations you can actually use alarms as timers. So I'm going to create a new shortcut here. Again I'm going to use Clock. But first I'm going to look for Date here and do Adjust Date. I'm going to Add, and let's say ten minutes, to what. I'm going to Control Click, right finger click or two-finger click here and Insert current Date. You can see if I were to run this you can see it adds ten minutes to the current time there. Now I can use a Clock shortcut Action here to Add an Alarm and I'm going to create an alarm for, and then I'm going to Control Click here and say Adjusted Date. It is going to tie this into this and I can name this. So I can name it, say, test. I can also click here and say that I don't want any snooze allowed. So now I can call this Test Timer, like that. When I run this it is not going to start a timer but an alarm. At least the Alarm has a name. Now if I go to the Clock App and look under Alarms I can see that alarm running with that name. 

So I can create multiple alarms that way that act somewhat like timers. They are not as good as timers because you can't pause them but at least they will allow you to have multiple things happen at a certain amount of time from when you trigger the shortcut.

Now one of the frustrating things about timers is they can't easily repeat. In other words you can't have a timer tell you when 15 minutes is up and immediately start again for another 15 minutes. But there are some alternatives for doing that. For instance you can use the Reminders App. In the Reminders App you can add a reminder and, I'll just call this test, and I can add Date to it, and have it today. Let's have this one remind us an hour from now so at 12:36 p.m. and then I can click the i button here and say repeat hourly. So now I will get a reminder every hour until I go in and either disable this repeat here or I delete this reminder. 

Another option is to use an Alarm with a Snooze. So you can, say, set this alarm to go off at say 11:55 and then snooze you can go up to 15 minutes for a snooze here. So you can kind of get a reminder every 15 minutes until you just decide to turn off the alarm. Another method people find really handy is to go into System Settings and then go to Menu Bar. Then look for the Clock options button. This allows you to determine how the clock in the Menu Bar looks. But an extra functionality in here is to have Announce The Time turned On. You can set it to hourly, every half hour, every quarter hour and have a different voice announce the time.

You can also use the Terminal for this. So in the Terminal you can do these one line commands and you can open as many additional terminal windows as you want. So you can have different things running in different terminal windows. So you just have one terminal window open and then you could type; sleep and then give it a number of seconds. So, for instance, if I were to do just five seconds that's all it would sleep for. But you can say 600 seconds to have it sleep for ten minutes. While it is sleeping it is not using any resources. So even though the Terminal Window is open and running you can just Hide it to get it out of the way. Then you can use 2 ampersands here and put a command after it that will happen after the sleep is over. So, for instance, I'll paste this one in; afplay which I believe stands for audio file play, and then it is linking to the system sound ping right there. So now if I run this it will sleep for 5 seconds and then play that sound. That's it. The command is done. You could also use the same thing and then do, say and then in quotes you can have it say something. Like that. Then it will speak that. Look up the terminal command say for more options. 

Here's a more complex one that's going to do a repeating loop, sleeping for 5 seconds and then using say to say a word and continuing to repeat. You can run this and this window is now dedicated to basically sleeping 5 seconds and then saying a word and then sleeping for 5 seconds and saying the same word again. To stop it all you need to do is go back to this window and use Control, not command, C and it will quit out of this loop. So it is a pretty easy way to actually have a little timer like this going. 

Use like 900 here instead of five to have it do it every 15 minutes. It may seem pretty extreme to go to the Terminal to set a timer or a repeating timer like this but it is so simple that it may still be the best way to go in some situations. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.