The Stopwatch Is More Useful Than You Think
Most people treat a stopwatch as a basic fallback. Tempo's stopwatch — with lap tracking and parallel running alongside countdowns — is a proper tool for timing open-ended work.
The stopwatch is the underrated mode. People reach for countdowns by default — set a duration, count toward zero, get an alert. The stopwatch gets used when you don't know how long something will take, and that's roughly where most people's thinking stops.
But a stopwatch with lap recording, running in parallel with other timers, is a genuinely different tool. Here's what it's actually good for.
The basics
Tempo's stopwatch starts at 00:00 and counts up. Pause it, resume it, reset it. No end point, no alert — it runs until you stop it.
The useful part is the lap button. Every time you tap it, the stopwatch records the current elapsed time and calculates the split — how long that particular segment took. Laps stack in reverse order, newest on top. You get a running record of every segment, with per-lap split times alongside cumulative elapsed time.
What laps are actually for
Tracking segments of open-ended work. You're editing a document section by section. Each lap marks the end of a section. At the end, you have a record of how long each section took — useful for calibrating future estimates.
EMOM training. Every Minute on the Minute workouts have a variable rest component: you do a defined amount of work and the remaining time in the minute is your rest. The stopwatch tracks the work period; hitting lap marks the end of the work and shows your split. Run a parallel 60-second countdown to keep the minute structure. You get both the structure (countdown) and the record (laps).
Tracking how long tasks actually take. You think a task takes 20 minutes. Run a stopwatch while you do it. Lap it when you finish. Do this for a week and you'll have accurate baselines for how long your regular tasks actually take — not how long you think they take.
Meeting time tracking. You're in a meeting with multiple agenda items. Start the stopwatch, hit lap at each transition. At the end you have a record of exactly how much time each item consumed. More honest than estimates.
Running alongside countdowns
Stopwatches and countdowns live on the same board and run simultaneously. This combination is more powerful than either mode alone.
The most common pattern: a countdown for the deadline or the session limit, a stopwatch for the open-ended work happening within it. The countdown tells you how much time remains; the stopwatch tells you how much time you've actually spent.
In Focus mode, you can swipe between a running countdown and a running stopwatch without interrupting either. Both keep going while you're viewing the other.
No Finished state
Unlike countdowns, stopwatches don't have a Finished state. They're open-ended by design. When you're done, you stop them manually. This is intentional — a stopwatch timing something open-ended shouldn't decide when the thing is over.