1 Minute Timer

Sixty seconds is easier to misjudge than you think

A minute is the shortest stretch of time most people bother to measure at all. It feels trivial. It is also the interval people get wrong most often: hold a plank for what you are certain is sixty seconds, then look at a real clock, and the gap is usually humbling. That is the entire case for a countdown you can see instead of one you keep in your head.

• Brushing your teeth, twice through if you follow the usual two-minute dental advice
• A plank, a wall sit, or the rest gap between two heavy sets
• Steeping green tea, which turns bitter fast if you walk away
• A one-minute answer limit in a quiz round, a debate, or a stand-up meeting
• Timing a child's turn so nobody has to argue about whose it is
• Giving a slow app, a kettle or a stubborn download exactly sixty more seconds

Starting it, pausing it, and going again

The fields above already read one minute, and the large readout shows 01:00 before you touch anything. Press Start and it moves. Pause freezes the count if someone walks in, Resume continues from the same second rather than from the top, and Reset returns the fields to one minute instead of to zero, which is the point: the next round is one press away.

Rounds, drills and turns

Short intervals are rarely used once. A drill is six rounds. A game gives every player sixty seconds. There is deliberately no repeat button here, because an automatic restart is the wrong default for a one-minute interval: the whole reason you stopped is usually to swap players, change exercise, or say the next question out loud. Press Reset and then Start, and you control when round two begins. If you want the break to begin on its own instead, that is what the Pomodoro timer does.

Sound at zero, or silence if you need it

At zero a two-tone beep plays three times, roughly two and a half seconds in total. It is generated in your browser, so there is no audio file to download and nothing to allow. Tap the speaker icon before you start and the sound is off while the on-screen message still appears, which is what you want in a quiet room or a shared office. One honest limit: if your phone is locked and the browser is fully closed, no web timer can make a noise, so a one-minute countdown is best kept on a screen you can see.

A short countdown loses the most from a sleeping tab

Browsers slow down tabs you are not looking at, which is good for your battery and bad for a naive timer that counts one tick at a time. Drifting three seconds matters little over an hour. Over sixty seconds it is five percent of the whole interval. This timer sidesteps it by working out the exact clock time your minute will end the moment you press Start, then comparing against that fixed target on every update, so switching tabs mid-count costs you nothing.

When a minute is not the length you wanted

One minute sits at the bottom of the range. The nearest ready-made countdowns on this site are all longer: