The unlikely origin story of productivity tool Time Timer

The image of a clock might spring to mind, maybe even a time-lapse video of a clock’s hands traveling in a circle. But 25 years ago, stay-at-home mom turned entrepreneur Jan Rogers found a better way.

To help her 4-year-old daughter, who was struggling to read clocks and understand the passage of time, Rogers invented the Time Timer, a visual countdown clock that essentially turns the 60-minute face of a clock into a pie chart. If she were to set the timer for 60 minutes, for instance, the clock would start with a full red pie, slowly getting smaller as 60 minutes turned to 45, 30, 15, and so on. The design helped her daughter understand the concept of time with a single glance.

But as it turns out, the Time Timer isn’t just great for kids learning how to tell time—it has also become a favorite time management tool for everyone from children with special needs to the tech industry’s productivity hackers. This is the unlikely story of the analog clock that has taken tech-addled Silicon Valley by storm.

Rogers first developed a basic prototype made of two paper plates, joined up with a design engineer who helped her build a working version, and then started talking to manufacturers about building it. Because she had no idea how many she’d be able to sell, she had a hard time finding someone to fabricate her timers. Eventually, she had individual parts made and started snapping together Time Timers in her living room. For the first few years, she was selling fewer than 100 units a year.

Her company finally took off when Rogers started going to education conferences, where teachers—particularly special education teachers—began to buy Time Timers to help students with cognitive disabilities like autism, ADHD, and dyslexia tell time. The product was adopted by the special needs community, with one important change: Rogers initially had designed the timer to be blue and yellow, but she heard from special needs teachers that these colors were more difficult to tell apart. As a result, she switched Time Timer’s color palette to red, white, and black.

“Then over the years as the timers were showing up in the classroom, specifically for learning-disabled child, the mainstream teachers started to realize that the entire classroom was benefiting,” Rogers says. “The reality is that time is difficult for everybody, whether it’s cognitive, distraction, frustration, or vision problems.”

Source: Fastcompany.com

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