Timer — for facilitators

Samvinas

• Enable the Timer in the Utilities section of your session view.
• Set a duration and start it. Everyone — participants, the display page, you — sees the same countdown in the footer.
• Pause and Reset are yours; Reset returns the clock to the duration you configured, ready to start again.
• The panel remembers your last duration, and you can type a custom number of minutes.
• Any device can turn the countdown into a full-screen clock — tap the footer chip, anywhere along it, including the small expand icon at its right-hand end. Useful for a laptop feeding a projector, or a spare tablet propped on a table. Fullscreen is a local view (each device chooses its own), the screen stays awake, and your pause/reset controls are in the overlay.

The Timer sits outside the flow — it produces no items and consumes none; it simply keeps time over whatever tool the group is in.

Paper and pen

You need: a kitchen timer or a phone with a big timer display, and somewhere the whole room can see it.

• Write the end time, not the duration, on the flip chart — "until 14:25" keeps working even when nobody is watching a clock.
• Prop the timer where it can be seen, or project a phone timer if there's a screen.
• Give one spoken waypoint — "two minutes left" — not a running commentary.
• Failure mode to avoid: keeping the time in your head. If only you know the deadline, only you feel it — and the nagging becomes your job again.

When & why

Reach for a visible timebox for any bounded burst of work — a brainstorm round, a breakout task, a report-back — anywhere energy leaks when the end is vague.

• Announce the timebox before starting the clock, and say what happens when it ends — "three minutes, then we vote" beats a countdown with no consequence.
• Short beats generous: a slightly-too-tight timebox keeps energy up, and you can always add a minute.
• What usually follows: whatever you promised — a focusing tool like Voting, or the report-back from Breakout Groups.