Work timer

How to use the online timer

A working day here has a distinctive shape: it starts early, the first hour is often the only quiet one, the middle belongs to meetings and to Europe coming online, and Friday is shorter than the rest with the midday prayer at its centre. Timing blocks against that shape works considerably better than importing a routine designed for a nine-to-five somewhere else.

These pages cover the units the day is actually built from — an hour of focused work, a ninety-minute block for anything that takes time to get into, a half-hour meeting, a ten-minute break away from the desk, and a lunch break long enough to be one. Ramadan rearranges all of it for a month, with shorter hours and the whole day tilted towards sunset, and the same blocks still apply on a compressed schedule.

Timing the work is also a way of finding out where it goes. Most people are surprised by how much of an hour disappears into messages that felt like they took a moment. Ending a block deliberately, with a note of what was finished, makes the next one easier to start — which matters more on a Thursday afternoon than any amount of willpower.