Using Timers On Your iPhone With iOS 17

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can set Timers in iOS 17 including the ability to have multiple timers going at once. 

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Now Timers in the Clock App on your iPhone have been around since the beginning. But new functionality in iOS 17 means that you can have multiple timers set now. So things have changed a little bit. 

Let's go into the Clock App and it's going to take you to whatever screen you're on last time. So, here I'm on the World Clock. Let's go to Timers at the bottom right. Now I can set a timer and you can use these little wheels here to set the number of hours, the numbers of minutes, and the number of seconds. You have a start button there but before you tap the Start button you may want to set a label. Now that you can have multiple timers it's much more useful to have a label there so you remember what each timer is for. So, for instance, if I want to complete a work task in like 15 minutes I may want to label it so I remember what the timer is for when it actually goes off or when I check the amount of time remaining. 

Once I've set a label the next thing I want to do is determine what happens when the time ends. Usually that means playing a sound which can be one of the ring tones that you have on your iPhone. So you can go through all the different ring tones that are there, set it each time you select one it's actually going to play that sound so you'll hear it. But the last option here is Stop Playing. That's a special feature there. That will actually stop the Music App or Podcast App from playing. So you can use this as a sleep timer. So you can listen to music or a podcast as you're going to sleep knowing that it will shut off after, say, 15 minutes. Then you tap Set here and now you've set what happens when the Timer ends. 

Now all that is left to do is Start it. So you tap the Start button there and now you can see the Timer at the top of the list of timers here. You've got a Pause button and a Play button. You've got the label right underneath the time. If you didn't put a label it will actually give you the total amount of time. So here it would have said 15 minutes instead of Work Task. 

Now you can actually go and add another timer. To do that you would tap the Plus button at the top right. You have the same set of controls. So let's set a timer here for a hour. I'll give it a different label, like that. Maybe I'll choose a different sound to play. Notice there are preset times on this screen. This only appears if you are on the screen  after tapping that Plus button. It is a shame it is not there on the initial screen. Maybe that will be true in a future update. So you can choose one of these presets and it will set the time to that. You can also tap Recents here. We will look at Recents in a minute. So I'll start this timer and now you can see I've got two timers going. I can Pause and Resume them independently of each other. 

If I want to change the label of one I can. Tap it and it will go into this special screen that just shows you the Timer. There's a big circle that shows you the amount of time that has elapsed. So this orange line will disappear as time goes on. You've got the time in the middle and you have the current end time for this. So if I don't Pause this anymore this is when this timer will finish. Now I can also Cancel the timer here. Same as deleting it. But I could change the name of the timer and change it to something else. Even change what is going to happen when the timer is done. So now when I go back to the List of Timers I can see the new name is there. 

Now Recents allows you to start a Timer based on a previous timer. So, for instance, if this Work Task is something I do all the time then this Timer will remain in my Recents. The Recents List can get pretty long. I can simply tap it to start a new timer at that amount of time with that label. So an easy way to recreate Timers. You don't have to start every timer by specifying a time and details just from scratch. The Recents List is very useful. 

Now to remove a Timer I can, of course, go into it and tap Cancel. But I can also just swipe to the left and Delete it and it gets rid of it. One interesting note here. Notice that though I changed the name of this Timer, Recents still has the old name. I found that if I Pause and then Resume the Timer it actually adds this Timer with the updated label there. Now if I want to get rid of this one you can easily get rid of one of the Recents by swiping to the left and Deleting. So you can kind of keep your Recents List clean. If you know you are not going to reuse a timer you can get it out of the Recents List and then leave the ones in there that are what you might use again. 

Note the List here is always going to be in the order of Time Remaining. So the first timer that is going to expire should be here at the top. You can also go to Edit here and use the little Delete button to remove timers and Recents. 

When you have timers going if you go to your Lock Screen, and I'll do that by dragging down here at the top of the screen, you're going to get this live Widget now in iOS 17 that will allow you to see the amount of time remaining, see a label. Now you can Pause it and Resume it if you have one timer going. Then those buttons work right away. Otherwise you have a stack here and you have to expand the stack first. I can Pause this one and Resume it and I can say Cancel this one, for instance. So you can deal with these existing timers right here on the Lock Screen. If your phone is unlocked you can simply tap over here to the right and it will take you right to the Clock App. 

Now I can work with Timers in the Control Center here as well. In Control Center there is a Timer's button. Now if I tap and hold here it brings up this screen that shows me the current Timer, the one that's closest to being done, and the amount of time left. I can Pause it and Resume it. If I tap the Plus button here it takes me to the Timer App. 

Now let's go and set this up like there is no timers going at all. So I have removed that last timer. So now when I go to Control Center here and I can see that the Timer button isn't active any more. There is no current timer. So if I tap this it just takes me to the Timer's App. If I tap and hold it takes me to the special screen where I can start a new Timer. So I can drag this up or down.  Go to a specific time. Notice those presets were the same as what we saw on a previous screen, tap Start. So now I've got this Timer going right here. Set for 20 minutes. I can Pause it and Resume it. This screen really works best if you only have one Timer going. If you actually change this it does something very strange. I'll change it to 5 minutes and release. You can see the Timer changes to 5 minutes. Let's go into the Timer App and see what has happened. We can see that the previous Timer was changed to 5 minutes and it also started a new Timer.  It probably is not supposed to do that. So I'd only use that special screen to start a new Timer if you have no Timers currently going. 

There's one more way that you can start a Timer with a label. That is just to use Siri. Start a Timer named Meditation for 10 minutes. (Siri: 10 minute meditation timer counting down). You could also stop Timer's using that label. Stop the Meditation Timer. So what I would do now, once you have iOS 17, go into the Clock App and try creating some different Timers. Look at all the different settings. Get to know the interface so that when you need to make a Timer you already know how to use it. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.