Shared workshop timer

Put this page on the projector or the shared screen, then send the link to everyone who wants the countdown on their own laptop. The first person into an empty room gets the controls; everyone else watches. If the facilitator changes partway through a workshop, the new one presses Take control and the old panel turns back into a display. There is only ever one controller, so two people cannot fight over the clock.

The room never sends ticks. It broadcasts the instant the countdown ends, and each screen counts down to that instant against its own clock. That keeps the traffic to a handful of small messages per session, and it means a screen that wakes from sleep or reconnects after a dropout shows the right number immediately instead of resuming a stale count.

When time runs out the clock keeps going and turns amber, counting up as overtime. That is usually more useful than a timer that stops at zero: the room can see how far past the slot it has gone. The message banner and the flash toggle are there for the moment before that, when you want the group to start landing the discussion without interrupting whoever is speaking.

The presets cover one minute to an hour, and the custom field takes any whole number of minutes up to a full day. Start puts the whole length on the clock. The plus and minus buttons move the end instant by a minute and move the total with it, so the bar underneath keeps showing the fraction of the slot that is left rather than sliding out of step with the numbers.

Picking a different length while the clock is running is the one control that surprises people. It does not add to what is left; it restarts the countdown at the new length from this moment. If a group needs five more minutes, press the plus button five times or pause first. Reset puts the clock back to the length you set, stops any flashing, and leaves the banner alone.

Nothing about the room survives it. There is no saved list of slot lengths, no record of how long each exercise really took, and no way to queue one countdown after another. For a session that runs through a fixed list of segments, the agenda timer is the tool that holds the list.

The screens figure counts connections rather than people. A facilitator with the room open on a laptop and a phone is two screens, and the projector is a third, so the number is a check that the timer is actually up somewhere rather than a headcount. One room accepts two hundred separate devices before it starts turning arrivals away, which is well beyond what a projector and a set of laptops needs.

A name is optional and at most forty characters, and it appears under the countdown only while that screen is connected. Leaving it blank still counts the screen. The banner takes up to a hundred and twenty characters and stays on every screen until someone clears or replaces it, so a "five minutes left" note written at the wrong moment will outlive the moment.

Control passes by asking for it rather than by being granted it. Whoever is driving keeps the panel until someone else presses Take control, and the seat also opens on its own when the controller closes their tab. The countdown is unaffected either way, because every screen is already counting towards an instant the room agreed on.