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, and seconds. You can click on any one of these and type. You can also use the up and down arrow keys to adjust each of these numbers. You could set the sound that will be played when the timer is finished and then simply click Start and the timer will begin. Now to monitor a timer while it's running, you could 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 could 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 could relaunch the Clock app or you can click here and go right to Timers and then you could also monitor here with this large readout. Note also here just above you see the time at which this timer will end. You could pause and then later resume and this would update with a new time as well. And to stop a timer, you would 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 recents list. You could see it here. So you could 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 tap to the next field and type zero there. Set a different sound for this and start it. You can see the interface changes now to show you the two timers here at the top. You could 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 multiple 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 could 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 could set here and I have this set to ST. So I could instead of typing start timer I could just type ST and then return. Then it's 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 could see that it's running. If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon. 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's just going to launch the clock app and take me right to timers. That's why it's not quite as useful. You can't even set the time. It's 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 could 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. And you could just say something like timer 14 minutes like that and then Siri's going to start the timer and it's going to show you it right here. You can't even just pause it right away but you could also go into the clock app and see that it's 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 and you could see the name right there. And if I click here or click in the menu bar to go to it you could see it properly named the timer. So now I could 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 could tell Siri to pause the timer and you can see it's paused. I can tell it to resume the timer and it resumes. And 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 and I could tell to stop the timer. Another really cool thing you could do with Siri is you could 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 could calculate the number of minutes and all that but Siri can do it for me. I could just type something like that and you could see it set a timer for 21 minutes and it was like 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's 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. We'll launch shortcuts here and I want to create a new shortcut and 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 10 and I could use minutes seconds or hours and I can then name it something like 10 minute timer. Now if I run this shortcut it starts the timer there it does it rather quietly and you could 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 starts a timer for a specific time this is how you do it because with shortcuts you can go to file and then add to dock and now we'll add this as an icon right here 10 minute timer that I could click and it will run. You could 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 could add it to the menu bar as well then I have to choose the shortcut so I'm going to choose that 10 minute timer shortcut that I just created and you can see it's added there so now I can use control center to start a 10 minute timer or I could have put that in the menu bar and use the menu bar to start a 10 minute timer you could also go back to the shortcut here and instead of saying 10 minute you can erase this I'm going to control click in it and change it to insert variable ask each time and now when I run this shortcut it's going to ask for the duration so now I could trigger that with the dock or with control center and I could change the time to let's say 15 minutes and 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 matter of fact if you try to do two start timers and shortcut it won't work but you can set alarms and 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 and again I'm going to use clock but first I'm going to look for date here and do adjust date and I'm going to add and let's say 10 minutes to what I'm going to control click right click or two finger click here and insert current date you could see if I were to run this you could see it adds 10 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's 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 and when I run this it's not going to start a timer but an alarm but at least the alarm has a name and now if I go to the clock app and look under alarms I could see that alarm running with that name so I can create multiple alarms that way that act somewhat like timers they're 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 could 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 hourly so 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 let's just say 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 decide to turn off the alarm another method people find really handy is to go into system settings and then go to menu bar and then look for the clock options button this allows you to determine how the clock in the menu bar looks but some extra functionality in here is to have announced the time turned on you could 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 could open as many additional terminal windows as you want so you could 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 10 minutes while it's sleeping it's 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 could use two 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 af play which I believe stands for audio file play and then it's linking to the system sound ping right there so now if I run this it will sleep for five seconds and then play that sound and that's it the command is done you could also use the same thing and then do say and then in quotes you could have it say something like that and then it will speak that look up the terminal command say for more options done there's a more complex one that's going to do a repeating loop sleeping for five seconds and then using say to say a word and continue to repeat you can run this and this window is now dedicated to basically sleeping five seconds and then saying a word time and then sleeping for five seconds and saying the same word again time and to stop it all you need to do is go back to this window and use control that's control not command c and it will quit out of this loop so it's 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's so simple that it may still be the best way to go in some situations hope you found this useful thanks for watching if you like this video click the thumbs up button below to let me know i publish new tutorials each weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out