The Wind-Down Timer sets a length of time before bed, splits it evenly across a list of activities and walks you through them one at a time. Thirty minutes, four things to do, a countdown for whatever you are on right now and nothing else on the screen.
It is for the nights where the plan was to be asleep by eleven and the phone says 12:40. A wind-down gives your brain a ramp instead of a cliff, and a timer stops the ramp from turning into another hour of scrolling you tell yourself is research.
Before you press Start: the split is arithmetic, not sleep science. The default 30 minutes divided by the four default activities comes to 7 minutes 30 seconds each, and the tool rounds the division down to whole seconds rather than fudging the numbers to make them fit.
A pre-sleep wind-down timer that walks you through a calming routine step by step, so you actually fall asleep faster.
How it works
Two fields. Wind-down duration in minutes, anywhere from 5 to 120 with 30 in the box, and a comma-separated list of activities that arrives reading Read a book, Light stretching, Meditation, Journaling. Change either one, then press Start Wind-Down.
The display shows the seconds left on the current activity in mm:ss, which step of the list you are on, the name of the activity, a progress bar and a line confirming the total duration. The button turns into Pause while it runs and Resume when you stop it. When the last activity runs out you get 00:00, Wind-Down Complete and a short good night message. Reset clears the screen and puts the button back to Start Wind-Down.
A worked example
Defaults: 30 minutes, four activities. 30 x 60 is 1800 seconds, divided by 4 gives 450, so each activity gets 07:30 and the four of them add back up to 30 minutes exactly. The run goes Activity 1 of 4 through Activity 4 of 4 and finishes clean.
Change the duration to 45 with five activities and each step becomes 540 seconds, or 09:00, again exact. Twenty minutes over three activities gives 400 seconds each at 06:40. Ninety minutes with five activities lands on 18:00 per step. The pattern holds whenever the division comes out whole.
It stops holding when it does not. Thirty minutes with seven activities means 1800 divided by 7, which floors to 257 seconds, so each step reads 04:17 and the seven of them total 1799 seconds. You lose one second. Small enough to ignore, but it tells you how the tool thinks: whole seconds, remainder dropped, no attempt to borrow from the next activity.
Where it falls short
There is no sound at all. No chime when an activity ends, no alarm when the whole thing is done. The change is a line of text, so if the tab is behind three others you will not know anything happened. Reasonable on a tool whose job is to get you off a screen, and a real problem if you wanted a nudge.
Trust the countdown, not the bar. The progress bar starts three-quarters full, hits 100% at the end of the first activity, then jumps back down and starts climbing again, so it finishes somewhere other than full. The mm:ss number next to it is accurate; treat the bar as decoration.
Also, run it again with Reset first. After the final activity the counter has reached the end of your list, and pressing Start at that point does not rebuild it. And an even split is only a default: if the thing that actually helps you sleep is ten minutes of writing, list one activity and give it the whole duration.
One honest note on the routine itself. A consistent wind-down is a well-known sleep habit, but this is a timer, not medical advice. If you are lying awake night after night regardless of what you do beforehand, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than extending the timer to 120 minutes.
Other tools
- 52/17 Focus Timer — the same idea pointed at work hours instead of bedtime
- 90-Minute Focus Timer — one long block when you are already in the middle of something
- Count-Up Flow Timer — counts up instead, so there is no end time to dread
Frequently asked questions
How long should a wind-down be?
Thirty minutes is a decent starting point and the tool caps out at 120 if you want a longer routine. What matters more than the number is doing the same thing most nights, so pick a length you can repeat on a Tuesday when you are tired.
Can I change the activities?
Yes, type them into the second box separated by commas, in the order you want them. Four short entries spread the time thin, two entries give each one a big chunk, and a single entry gets the entire duration to itself.
Does it make any sound?
No. Nothing plays at a transition or at the end, so the timer has to be somewhere you can see it. That suits a shared room or a library, and it means nobody gets woken up by a beep from the desk.
What if I feel sleepy before it finishes?
Go to bed. The routine is there to make sleep come easier, not to delay it for the sake of a full bar. Press Reset so the next night starts clean.
Can I pause halfway through?
The button toggles between Start, Pause and Resume, so you can stop it while you deal with something and pick the same activity back up. The seconds hold where you left them.
Why does the progress bar jump around?
Because it is calculated from the activity boundary rather than from time since you started, and it recalculates every time one activity hands over to the next. The countdown is the reliable number here.