Why you should create countdown timers for your team

Set an end date, calculate the remaning time. It's that simple and yet, can play a crucial role in any team's performace.

Every team or individual has certain deadlines almost all the time. More often than not these directly impact the individual's, team's, or company's performance and deliverables. Especially now, in this new remote-work world, keeping track of deadlines becomes even more important and challenging at the same time.

How it's done today and the flip side

Today, most teams follow adhoc methods such as using post-its, digital reminders, etc. to keep an eye on a certain deadline(s). While this mostly helps, it's not ideal. There are obvious flip sides to the existing approach:

1. A vast majority of us have more than one deadline in succession and it's easy to forget or mix dates up.
2. Our brain space should be used to solve problems and create things, rather than remember deadlines and the related math.
3. We tend to take up other tasks or make small commitments when we don't have a visual represantation of how much time we have left to a certain deadline that we are responsible for.

Solution

The good news is, this is not a difficult probelm to solve. The answer? — A countdown timer.

A countdown timer is a constant reminder for something actionable, along with the time remaning. It's a visualization available at all times reminding you about the time left. Have a countdown timer for every important deadline. This is sure to change the productivity of the team.

Benefits of countdowns

1. Creates a sense of urgency, thus keeping you on schedule.
2. Tracking this can help an individual improve how they work.
3. As you cover more ground, the effort required for the remaining work reduces, and tracking your time helps re-estimation of effort remaining.

You can create a timer on your own and it's as simple as can get.