- Tags
- Time Management Tips (38)
- Guest Blog (24)
- Home & Organization (22)
- special needs (19)
- business (14)
- education (14)
- family (13)
- In The Media (11)
- autism (8)
- Letters to Jan (8)
Outreach
Letters To Jan
7 New Features in Time Timer iPhone App!
Seven new features will appear in the Time Timer iPhone App next week, giving fans of this visual timer new groundbreaking ways to manage and enjoy their time! See the Pinterest Preview.
If you currently own the Time Timer iPhone or iPod Touch App, look for this free update in your iTunes soon. New users can download the $1.99 Time Timer App here.
Top New Feature
With this new update, you will be able to display up to four Time Timers at once, helping you visualize time for multiple projects, children or blocks of time simultaneously.
Check out the full new feature list below – features marked with a star * were suggested by Facebook Fans!
All New Features
1. *Name and customize your Timers.
2. *Save each Timer to use again.
3. Run up to four Timers at once.
4. View each Timer full-screen – or see up to four together on a single screen.
5. *Set by touch – or simply pick a number.
6. *Quickly pause, edit and restart your Timers.
7. *Awake Mode: make sure your iPhone doesn't fall asleep while Timers are running!
How It Works
1. From the "My Timers" screen, press "Add Timer."
2. Choose a Timer Mode: Original 60 Minutes, Custom or Clock.
3. Set the Duration, Number of Plays and Options. Save.
4. From any screen, tap the Home icon in the upper-left corner.
5. Select up to four Timers and press "Play Timers."
6. Tap "Play All!"
Check in tomorrow for more updates on the Time Timer iPhone App
Is the wristwatch becoming obsolete?
Yeah, there’s an app for that.
Have you ever seen someone tap their left wrist and look at you quizzically? If you’re over 30, you know that means they’re asking, “What time is it?”
But as writer Matthew Battles points out in the January issue of Atlantic magazine, the college class of 2014 would have no idea what that gesture means.


In his article, A New Wrinkle in Time, Battles maintains that the Smartphone generation not only tells time a different way but lives time a different way.
Forget segmenting life into seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months. Forget indenturing yourself to the clock’s efficient mastery of time.
Today, life is fluid and so is time, Battles explains; and therefore it should be measured in experiences, not in ticktockticks. Accordingly, today’s Smartphone offers a broad spectrum of apps that enable us to view time as moments rather than minutes.
Battle cites numerous examples:
“LookBackMaps, a San Francisco Web development company, has created an iPhone mapping app that lets the user overlay historical photographs of places onto the iPhone’s camera view, combining past and present in a single picture—crowding wagons and horses, cobblestones and ghostly pedestrians into modern cityscapes.
Everywhere online, time comes loose from its moorings: Google combines books from all eras into one big book; YouTube brings motion pictures from the early 20th century into dialogue with today’s viral videos."
But what about those parts of your life where you do have to sync up with time constraints or other people’s schedules? Yeah, there’s an app for that too. In fact, says Battles:
“Hundreds of time-related apps are available for the iPhone, from old-fashioned clock emulators to kitchen timers to tools to help keep meetings from running over.”
One such app is our own Time Timer. We introduced this app in November, 2009 and now more than 2,500 users make every moment count by simply tapping the Time Timer icon on their iPhone.

Does all this sound the death knell for the diamond-crusted mechanical wristwatch as a status symbol? Hardly! Battles points out that makers of luxury mechanical timepieces have upped the ante with new “apps” of their own – led by “one $625,000 model that will play you Tchaikovsky on a ‘built-in’ drum set and keyboards."
But one way or another, folks, Time marches on.
Read Matthew Battles' complete article A New Wrinkle in Time.
And purchase the Time Timer iPhone App.
Why Does Time Slow Down?
If you pay attention to time, it slows down (or seems to)!
Why? Neuroscience has a "simple" explanation.
Mad Science, a fascinating e-zine published on 109.com, recently explored the topic of how we perceive time. Their research probed a number of provocative issues:
Why can't you tell when an hour has passed without looking at a watch?
Why are you able to do three things at once?
Does coffee make time go faster?
Why does time fly when you're having fun?

As a starting point, Neuroscientists say simply: Your brain is one of the least accurate time measurement devices you'll ever use.
Here's why: To a clock, time is OBJECTIVE. 60 seconds is always 60 seconds. But to your brain, a minute is relative. It can seem like a second, or forever, because your biological clock is SUBJECTIVE.
Another difference. A clock is indifferent to its environment. But your biological clock is easily influenced by moods, fatigue, drugs, or simply by increased awareness of the passing of time.
Example: It's 9:20 in your History of Western Civilization Class. The professor is lecturing. You're sleepy, hung over, and hungry. You glance at the clock every few seconds but its movement is agonizingly slow. Will 10am ever come?
Neuroscientists explain that your perception of time is based on the release of acetylcholine from a transmitting neutron being broken by Acetyl cholinesterase from a receiving neutron; the acetylcholine is then recycled in a continuous process.
And now that we've cleared that up...we can answer the question of why we have so much trouble estimating how much time an activity will require or how much time is left to complete a task. Turns out, our brain stores countless estimates of time required to accomplish similar activities, and provides us a choice. Unfortunately, we're not very good at choosing the most accurate estimate.
And the point of all this is...?
If you need to measure time precisely...don't rely on your brain. Use a clock. Right?
Then why do we so frequently rely on our biological clocks for important, even critical activities? Why are we perpetually late for meetings or picking up the kids? Why do we miss deadlines or run out of time to complete a presentation?
Exasperating, yes -- but, there is a silver lining.
With its shortcomings in measuring precise time, the brain is excellent at helping you multi-task. The reason is that we actually have more than one internal clock, and they can operate simultaneously - even for complicated tasks. For example, we have a clock that tracks our circadian rhythms - telling us when to sleep and eat. At the same time, you may have another clock operating to estimate how long you've been running on a treadmill and another to compute how many pages of your book you can read before you get tired of running -- or hungry.

But before you get too cocky about your internal clocks, we should point out that green algae also has a clock that measures its circadian rhythms. On the other hand, green algae doesn't swamp Amazon with orders for e-readers.
In fact, at this point, one of my internal clocks is warning me that my readers are reaching a saturation point. So it's time to stop writing. Besides, I'm getting hungry and, oops, I'm already late for my lunch appointment. Time flies when you having fun.


