RUNNING OUT OF TIME

RUNNING OUT OF TIME

There’s a track on Tyler, the Creator’s IGOR called “RUNNING OUT OF TIME,” and it’s one of those songs that sounds gentle but sits heavy. “Running out of time to make you love me” — it’s about urgency, about wanting something to work before the window closes. The whole song is built on this tension between trying and accepting, between holding on and finding peace in letting go.

The song reminded me of this tool immediately. It was a few days after the stopwatch went live — tool number 40, the first in our Time category — and there was this natural pull toward the other side of the coin. The stopwatch counts up, open-ended, no destination. A timer is the opposite. It counts down to something. There’s a finish line, and you either get there or you don’t.

There were a lot of iterations that night. The inputs had to be centered inside the ring, the display width had to match the stopwatch exactly, the font size in idle mode had to feel right against the countdown display. Probably eight or nine commits just on getting the inputs to sit properly. But that’s how it goes — the simple-looking things are the ones that take the most adjusting. You’re running out of time in the song, and we were running out of patience with CSS centering, which, honestly, felt thematically appropriate.

The result is a timer that does exactly what you need. You set a time, you press start, and you’re told when it’s done. No account, no ads, no permissions asked. No costume, no mask — just a countdown.

Take Your Mask Off

Tyler sings “take your mask off” and “Halloween ain’t for a minute, lose the costume” — he’s asking for honesty, for something real underneath all the performance. That’s the energy behind how this timer was designed. No flashy gimmicks hiding a bad experience underneath.

The fastest way to use it is the presets — six buttons across the top: 1 minute, 5, 10, 25, 30, and 1 hour. One tap and it’s running. The 25-minute preset is there for a reason — if you know, you know. If you don’t, look up the Pomodoro Technique and thank me later.

But if none of those fit, any duration can be typed directly into the ring. Hours, minutes, seconds — up to 99 hours, if something truly ambitious is being timed. The fields are highlighted on focus so you can just type over them. No clearing, no backspacing, just type.

Once it’s running, you get:

• The ring. It drains clockwise as time passes. You can feel it moving without reading the numbers. A glance from across the room tells you roughly how much is left — no mask, no guessing.
• Color shifts. Blue for most of the countdown. Orange when 25% is remaining — a gentle heads-up that time is running low. Red and pulsing when it’s done, because at that point, subtlety has left the building.
• Audio alert. A sound plays when the timer hits zero — your choice of four: Classic (three sharp beeps), Chime (gentle bells), Buzzer (unmistakable alarm clock energy), or Melody (a rising scale that feels like an accomplishment). They’re not loaded from a file or downloaded from anywhere — they’re synthesized in real time using the Web Audio API. Volume is adjustable, and the whole thing can be toggled off if silence is preferred.
• Pause and resume. Space is hit to pause. Hit again to pick up exactly where things were left off. The ring freezes, the countdown holds, nothing is lost.
• Fullscreen. Press F and the timer fills your screen. The ring scales up, the numbers get huge. Perfect for presentations, classrooms, or just making your kitchen counter feel like mission control.

And it remembers. Your last duration is saved, so the next time the tool is opened, the hours, minutes, and seconds are already filled in. Small touch, but if the same timer is used every day, it’s the kind of thing that’s appreciated. The costume is off — what you see is what you get.

The Waves Wash Over Me

“I wade in your water, the waves wash over me.” There’s this imagery in the song of being submerged, of time and feeling washing over you. That’s what the ring is supposed to feel like — not a number ticking down, but a sensation of time moving through you.

A number going from 25:00 to 24:59 is functional, but it’s not felt. The ring changes that. You see it draining and your brain registers the passage of time in a way that digits alone don’t deliver. It’s the difference between reading “50% complete” and seeing a glass half empty. The information is experienced, not just displayed. The waves wash over you, and you feel it without counting.

The color progression was designed with the same instinct. You don’t have to check the numbers to know where you are. Blue means you’re good. Orange means heads up. Red means it’s over. Three states, three colors, zero reading required.

The pulsing red at the end isn’t just aesthetic, either. It’s a visual fallback in case the audio can’t be heard — maybe you’re in a loud room, maybe the volume is down. The timer still tells you it’s done. Two senses are covered, no extra effort needed on your part.

And the transition from blue to orange? That 25% threshold was chosen deliberately. It’s early enough to be useful and late enough to not be annoying. A warning that respects your focus instead of interrupting it. Like a low tide coming in — you notice it, but it doesn’t knock you over.

I Found Peace in Drownin’

“It’s a low tide, I’ll be fine, I found peace in drownin’.” That line is about acceptance — about stopping the fight and trusting the process. Under the hood, this timer does something similar. It doesn’t fight the clock. It measures it with precision and trusts the math.

The timer is powered by requestAnimationFrame — the same browser API that’s used to render smooth animations. It syncs with your display’s refresh rate, usually 60 frames per second, which means the ring drains with visual precision instead of jumping in one-second steps.

The countdown doesn’t work by subtracting one second at a time. That approach would drift. Instead, a timestamp is recorded when start is pressed, and the remaining time is calculated on every frame by comparing the current moment to when the countdown began. If your browser lags, gets busy, or is switched away from and then returned to, the time is still accurate. It self-corrects because the math doesn’t depend on counting — it depends on measuring. There’s a peace in that, in trusting the system instead of fighting it.

The audio is generated entirely in your browser using the Web Audio API. Each sound option uses different oscillator configurations — sine waves for the Classic and Chime, square waves for the Buzzer, tuned frequencies for the Melody — all with shaped attack and decay envelopes. No audio files are loaded, no network requests are made. The sounds are born and die in your browser’s memory — nothing is sent, nothing is stored, nothing is tracked.

Your duration settings are kept in localStorage — a small storage area in your browser that never touches a server. Nothing about your timers, your habits, or your pasta preferences leaves your device. The most this tool communicates with the outside world is absolutely nothing, and that’s by design.

You deserve to understand the tools you use. Especially the ones that look this simple — because “simple” doesn’t mean nothing is happening. It means the work was done so you don’t have to think about it. Lose the costume. Here’s what’s underneath.

To Make You Love Me

“Running out of time to make you love me.” Tyler’s singing about a person, but the feeling translates — that urgency of wanting something to land, wanting it to be good enough.

We built a timer. It counts down, shifts colors, beeps, remembers your settings, and respects your privacy. It does exactly what you need and nothing that wasn’t asked for. There’s no signup wall, no ad before the countdown starts, no mysterious request for your location just to time a plank.

The 25-minute preset is my personal favorite. Set it, focus, take a break when it beeps. Repeat until the work is done or you’re not. It’s the kind of tool that quietly makes your day a little more structured without demanding your attention — and when it does demand it, it’s because you asked it to.

Go try it. Set 5 minutes. Watch the ring drain. See if it doesn’t feel like exactly what a timer should be.

We’re all running out of time. But at least now you’ll know exactly how much is left — no mask, no costume, just the countdown.