6 Minute Timer

Six minutes is a tenth of an hour

Law firms and plenty of agencies bill in six-minute units, so a job is logged as 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 of an hour rather than in minutes. Ten units make an hour and the arithmetic never leaves a remainder. The other common increment is the quarter hour, which is 0.25 and four to the hour, on the 15 minute timer.

360 seconds

Six minutes is 360 seconds, which puts the second hand through six full laps and the minute hand through 36 degrees, a tenth of the dial. Six is also on the short list of lengths that divide 60 without a remainder: 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30 all do. Seven, eight and nine do not, which is why they never became scheduling units.

What people set six minutes for

• A single billing unit, timed honestly rather than estimated afterwards.
• A jammy egg. Six minutes from boiling leaves a set white and a soft, spreadable yolk; ten minutes gives a firm one.
• One round in a class, a game or a debate, where six keeps ten rounds inside an hour.
• A warm-up block before a longer stretch, sized so that it cannot quietly become the whole session.

Before you rely on it

The count runs off the system clock rather than a ticking loop, so a background tab keeps proper time and comes back correct. The alarm is the fragile part: a sleeping phone may not make the noise at all. Keep something more dependable for the cases where a missed alarm matters, such as medication, a timed exam or a pan that will burn. More lengths are on the timer page.