Our tools for measuring, recording, remembering, and reasoning about time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excruciatingly detailed 22-page pdf article by Kensy Cooperrider at Topics in Cognitive Science on April 29, 2025 (Volume 18, Number 1, pages 147 to 168) titled Time Tools. He concludes:

 

“We humans come into the world with basically the same biological equipment for managing time as many other animals, and probably all other primates. But we nonetheless end up with an understanding of time that is unlike any other in the natural world. This is because we alone have developed cognitive technologies to help us grapple with temporal structures - and helpful they are. They allow us to tally, coordinate, predict, measure, record, remember, and reason; they allow us to deal with time in new, powerful ways. Though some of the consequences of time tools are quite recent, others are far older: some scholars have proposed that early time tools like seasonal calendars may have already begun to improve our foraging success in the Upper Paleolithic.

 

Our cognitive technologies for thinking about time have now become so deeply internalized, so woven into our understanding of the world, that we can barely imagine a world without them. Clocks, calendars, and timelines; seconds, minutes, hours; shared ways of talking about time as something to be saved and ‘budgeted’; ideas of time zones and deadlines and setting clocks back - these ideas are now utterly banal. Today, to not know the day of the week - an arbitrary convention par excellence—is to experience deep disorientation. Physicians check on patients’ faculties by asking them what year it is, and a common formal screening for cognitive impairment involves reading an analog clock. One of the most remarkable aspects of our time tools - and of human cognitive technologies in general - is that we grow so dependent on them that they become almost invisible.

 

Here, I have tried to shake up this feeling of invisibility - to remove, as it were, the glasses we had forgotten we were wearing. By focusing on earlier, less familiar time tools - in particular, those that came before the rise of ubiquitous ‘clock time’ - I have tried to bring into focus: first, the diversity of concepts, practices, and artifacts humans have developed for dealing with time; and, second, the universality of the practical problems that humans have used time tools to solve. The importance of our time tools is hard to overstate. Much is made –understandably - of our species’ ecological dominance, of the fact that we were able to spread over a vast swath of space, occupying niches that are completely inhospitable to other primates. Less is made of our species ‘temporal dominance,’ of the fact that we alone have learned to navigate and master - and, arguably, construct - a fourth dimension of the world. Without time tools this would have been, quite literally, unthinkable.”

 

An image of Big Ben came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Creating wallpapers for Zoom virtual backgrounds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Zoom it is possible to add a virtual background to replace the real one. You do not need to start with a  real green screen behind you. Where do you get backgrounds? Of course, Zoom has a web page about Zoom Virtual Backgrounds with links to a huge collection. I liked some at Wallpapers Wide, but a lot of them are distractingly busy.

 

Toastmasters International has a web page titled Toastmasters Zoom Virtual Background with a small assortment you can download as a zip file. A generic blue one is shown above, as is another which I recolored brown and titled for when I fill the Timer role in my club. That role is discussed in an article from the February 2021 Toastmaster magazine titled The Timer’s Toolkit. Why just blue or brown? The Timer might use green, yellow, and red backgrounds (downloaded at the Timer Zoom Backgrounds web page) in order to signal the speaker, so you should avoid those colors when you are not in that role. (I hold up timing cards rather than switch my background).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where else can you find simple backgrounds? Get out your camera or phone and look around at home. As shown above, I used the asphalt street, the concrete sidewalk, a wooden bookcase, and a shirt. You can use a paint or photo editing program to recolor or adjust brightness and contrast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You also can look around at a Creative Commons web site like Wikimedia Commons. I found a stone wall in Paris there, cropped it, and turned it gray. I found graph paper as well. I also found references there to an old book by Owen Jones titled The Grammar of Ornament, and downloaded the 1856 folio edition from the Internet Archive. When I perused his 112 color plates, I found a Pompeiian mosaic pattern on page 155 and an Arabian background on page 209. Then I used Photoshop Elements to crop and recolor them blue, and tiled them into wallpaper using Microsoft PowerPoint.   

 

Handling the Timer role at an online Toastmasters club meeting

On Wednesday evening I filled in as Timer at our online Zoom meeting for the Pioneer Toastmasters club. (Originally I was scheduled for that role next week, but this week’s timer couldn’t be there).

In a live club meeting the timer signals the speaker using “traffic light” timing cards, as shown above for a typical five to seven minute speech. But the speaker only gets their first feedback when they have reached the minimum time.

Instead I used my ‘progress bar’ cards, as are shown above. These provide feedback after every minute (more than twice as often). They were described in an April 17, 2017 blog post titled How the speech timer at Toastmasters club meetings could provide useful feedback rather than just warning signals – introducing the 21st Century Timing Cards. These cards also are used for Table Topics and Evaluations. Three progress cards can be shown at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4th of the minimum time. You could produce individual cards using a Paint or other photo editing program with a color printer.

At our previous online meetings the speech Timer instead has used green, yellow, and red virtual Zoom backgrounds, changed to signal the speaker. Toastmasters even has a set with their logo. At Wordpress for Toastmasters there was an article on November 29, 2017 titled New Online Timing Lights Tool.

It still is helpful for the speaker to keep track of their own time. They might use the Toastmasters App on a cell phone (propped up in a plastic container). They also could use a Stopwatch function on an iPod (as shown above), or even a kitchen timer.

How does your club handle the Timer role online?

Stopwatch, countdown, and progress-bar timers for speeches

It is very helpful to have a timer you can glance at to keep track of where you are during a speech. One common type is a stopwatch function on a wristwatch or smartphone app, but knowing how much time has elapsed really is less useful than knowing how much you have left (via a countdown function on a lab timer, as shown above).  

It is more useful to have an analog progress bar that uses a color change to display what fraction of the allotted time has been used and is left. On December 14, 2017 I blogged about a Review of the Timer function on the Toastmasters International Mobile App. That app provides a progress bar display.

I just ran across a blog post from June 18, 2018 by James T. Jarc titled The Color-Timer Method: Exploring the use of a visual timekeeping application in introductory public speaking classes. He linked to his Colortimers web site, which displayed four working timers.

One titled Blow out the Candle has a vertical progress bar that burns downward. It inspired me to use PowerPoint to mock up the horizontal Fuse Timer shown above. As the fuse burns down the flame gets taller.

Review of the Timer function on the Toastmasters International Mobile App

 

When I rehearse my speeches I usually time myself either with the stopwatch function on my Casio watch or a digital lab timer. I finally got around to downloading the Android version of the free Toastmasters International Mobile App at Google Play and tried it out on my Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G phone, as shown above.

When I opened the App it asked me to enter a Username and Password. For rehearsal I chose to skip that, and to continue to Use as Guest.

The timer on the Mobile App is quite useful, and easy to navigate. The top menu line first asks you to Select Speech…      V. When I clicked on that line I was asked to Select Speech Type, and given choices, which are:

Intro Speech (4:00 – 6:00)

Prepared Speech (5:00 – 7:00)

Extended Speech (8:00 – 10:00)

Table Topics (1:00 – 2:00)

Evaluation (2:00 – 3:00)

Custom…

Open Time

The Custom Speech type starts set at times for a prepared speech (5:00 – 7:00) and then both minimum and maximum can be adjusted up or down in 0:15 increments.

Initially the two circular touchscreen control buttons are Start (red) and Reset (gray).  Pressing Start changes the left button to Pause (black). When Pause is pressed, that button changes to show Resume (Red). On my phone the Timer displays 0.4 in. (1 cm) high 4-digit white numbers for minutes and seconds. The background begins as dark gray, and eventually changes to the usual Toastmasters traffic light colors of green (shown above), yellow, or red. 

The Timer also continuously displays a horizontal progress bar with a vertical line between a dark color (left) and a lighter color (right). But, as shown above, there is insufficient contrast between the grays, some contrast between the greens, and easily seen contrast between the yellows.

I would suggest that (as shown above) that contrast should be increased so that a quick glance at the Timer display always would clearly reveal what percent of the maximum time has elapsed.   

I also wanted a way to tilt my phone so the timer could be seen easily during rehearsals. Placing it inside a generic 9.5 oz. clear plastic food storage container (like those made by Glad or Ziploc) solved that problem. 

How the speech timer at Toastmasters club meetings could provide useful feedback – comments and replies

On April 17th I blogged about How the speech timer at Toastmasters club meetings could provide useful feedback rather than just warning signals – introducing the 21st Century Timing Cards. How they would be used for a 5 to 7 minute speech is shown above.

I only received one comment on this blog. Cleon Cox, III from the Portland, Oregon area just said:

“Well done Dr. Garber.”

Cleon runs the Job Finders Support Group, and is a Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM).  

On April 18th I pointed to that post at The Official Toastmasters International Group on LinkedIn. There were another nine comments made there (cut into paragraphs for readability), which I will share with you here along with my replies to them.

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Mike Rafferty, DTM:

There are many other speech lengths besides 5-7 and 4-6 minutes, even in just the CC manual. Sounds overly complicated for something that can be very simple.

REPLY

Mike: Yes, doing something useful is just slightly more complicated than doing something that’s almost useless.

For the CC manual the only other speech length just is 8 to 10 minutes for Project 10, Inspire Your Audience. It is easily handled just by changing the interval between cards to 2 minutes rather than one minute (and otherwise doing it like the Icebreaker).

Using a two-minute interval also would cover the 8 to 10 and 10 to 12 minute speeches in the Speeches by Management Manual. For the last 12 to 15 minute one, the interval between cards would have to be increased to 3 minutes.

For the Storytelling manual the 7 to 9 minute speeches for the first and fifth projects are a slight problem. There we might use a two-minute interval and display three progress cards before the green at seven minutes. If the Timer explains what he will be doing, then the Speaker shouldn’t be confused.

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Teri McDonald, DTM:

Paper is not 21st century. Even though your method gives feedback every minute, it feels an archaic in the digital age. There are great digital tools available for free. I like Timer4TM.

REPLY

Teri: When the battery on your Android smartphone dies (or catches on fire), it becomes just a dumb brick. You ALWAYS need to have a backup, like Timing Cards. And my method gives feedback at least three times before the green card, not just once per minute. For Table Topics it is every quarter minute, and for Evaluations it is every half minute.

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Tim Ramage:

It's an interesting idea. It is nice to have feedback prior to the minimum threshold. Timing of a speech comes down to preparation. A speaker, especially a beginning speaker, should have already prepared to the point that the speech timing is solidified prior to presenting it.

Preparation is a cornerstone of Toastmasters and mentors should be sending that message consistently to their mentees. By the time the green card appears, the prepared speaker knows the material well enough to have a solid idea how to wrap up. That includes beginning speakers. Of course nervousness can derail preparation and timing, but the idea behind preparation is to help assuage the natural nervousness. Provided the club provides a supportive environment, going over time isn't a sin...it is something to learn from and improve for the next speech.

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“Story Gordon” Hill:

We use a light system and have considered adding a fourth light, a lightning bolt, that is also wired to a speaker's ankle as a terminal reminder, "You're done!" :-D

REPLY

Gordon: In auto racing there is a Black Flag that means get off the track and go to the pits.
I blogged about it back in 2011. A black timing card (the cover) would tell a speaker that he is so over.

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Cliff Milligan, DTM:

Sounds like you are trying to compensate for poor preparation. If you've actually practiced your speech you should know where you are supposed to be at the Green, Yellow and Red markers. If you go over by 45 seconds it isn't the end of the world.

I don't want or need someone tracking every minute of my speech. Sounds like a helicopter parent to me. Speakers should be prepared to cut their speech short if they are running long. We had a new member do their Ice Breaker last meeting and when they were finished with their material they still hadn't hit the Green. I had worked with them beforehand and though the speech could be short and suggested having another section to add if the Green hadn't appeared yet. That is known as good preparation and working with their mentor.

In some of the advanced manuals you have 40 minute speeches. Seems to me like you would need a 5" binder to hold all the various permutations of your card displaying.

REPLY (in two parts)

Cliff's example with an Icebreaker speech illustrates the problem with lack of feedback that I'm trying to solve with these revised Timing Cards. A nervous speaker will be faster in the club than in his rehearsals. If he had those three points of feedback before getting to the Green warning signal, then he might have slowed down. (And I think he meant to say thought rather than though).

I said the Timer could provide useful feedback. If you DTMs don't need it, then just tell him to stay with the old Timing Card format, which we also might call Speech Contest Mode. Go look up the Fact Sheet from July 2015 to June 2016. The annual retention rate of Toastmasters members was only 55.4%. That means that if you started out with 25 members in a club you kept 14 but lost (and then hopefully replaced) 11. That's a lot of new members. Some of them will be nervous and inexperienced.

Cliff: No, you would not need a 5" binder to hold all the various permutations of the cards. It would take less than 20 pages to list all 85 manual speeches (plus Table Topics). Look at the lists from the Boston and Dallas Sunrise clubs.

The rules for displaying either three or four black & white progress cards coming before the Green card can be compactly stated in the following format.
Time to Green card (minutes):[time between progress cards(minutes)].
Here is the list for almost all of them 1:[1/4]. 2:[1/2]. 3:[3/4]. 4 and 5:[1]. 6, 7, and 8:[1-1/2]. 10:[2]. 12 and 15:[3]. 19, 20 and 22:[4]. 26:[5]. 28 and 31:[6].
The fifth project for Specialty Speeches, Introduce the Speaker, has the whole meeting as a time limit. If that was an hour, then it would be 60:[12].

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“Story Gordon” Hill:

My goal is to finish in the middle (one minute to go). It gives those who go long some time.

  

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David Lewtas:

If it ain't broke, don't fix (re-fix) it! This topic sounds like someone is bored and trying to create an answer when there really is no question.

Sure, the digital age has been foisted upon us, but that should not automatically take over everything. Many young people don't know how to WRITE their name, and for some people's, it is not readible in any manner of interpretation. Shame on them! Why isn't cursive handwriting taught in many schools?

Back to the digital question: Many people are ADDICTED to their "phones" for all their records and information. Then they cry when it's lost, with no hard-copy back up on phone numbers, etc. Many drive like maniacs when looking at them and they kill innocents. That is mis-usage of course.

Yes, if you need more timing signals, forget it; just LOOK at the timer lights or cards as you are supposed to.

REPLY

David: The topic of my post was cardboard cards – not anything remotely digital. Your comment sounds like a bad parody of a Table Topics answer. Was this rambling rant REALLY the best you could do after over FIFTY YEARS in Toastmasters? So Sad!

I’m going back to YouTube to watch Carrie Newcomer perform Don’t Push Send.

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Kelly Ellenz:

I always wish we had an option of a display timer, like they have at Ted Talks. Those first speeches, I was a person who spoke much faster presenting than practicing, And waiting for the green card actually gave me MORE anxiety. Now a 5-7 minute speech is a breeze, and I give them with 1-2 practice runthroughd. And can adapt on the fly. So, while I do agree this can be coddling. I think many new members neeed a little coddling. Speaking alone is a lot, then having an evaluator, time, ah counter, etc., it all compounds the stress. I think working toward more blind timing over time is a good goal. Most professional speakers get X minute warnings near the end. But when you're first starting out, why not eliminate unnecessary stress, and work on improving the most important parts of speaking - speak clearly, stay within time, eliminate filler words, etc. and all of this can be done with a timer shown or more warning cards.

Of course, speakers who want to compete would want to pass.

  

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Leslie Alvarado:

Oh my goodness David Lewtas, I was just so sure you were going to end your comment with, "AND GET OFF MY LAWN!!!"  Richard Garber, I agree this would be very helpful for us newbies. I just gave my second speech two weeks ago, and it felt like an eternity to get to the 5 minute mark. I thought the timekeeper had lost track, which I've seen happen before. It was definitely a distraction.

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GENERAL REPLIES

It is useful to think of the added feedback from these 21st Century Timing Cards in analogy with training wheels on a bicycle. They can be very helpful for beginners, but not needed by those with more experience.

Cliff Milligan claimed that if you practiced your speech, then you should know where you are supposed to be when you get to the warning signals. So did Tim Ramage.

Conversely if you have not been able to practice your speech, then you should not know where you are. But I also showed the cards being used for the impromptu Table Topics and speech Evaluations, both of which are done without practice. 

Mike Rafferty and Cliff Milligan had complained that I was making things complicated. If I had wanted to, then I would have called for there to always be four progress cards spaced equally before the green card. Their spacing in minutes just would have been the time for the green card divided by five. So, for a four-minute speech the spacing would have been 4/5 minute or 48 seconds, and the cards would be shown at 0:48, 1:36, 2:24 and 3:12. For a seven-minute speech the spacing would have been 1.4 minutes, with cards shown at 1:24, 2:48, 4:12, and 5:56.

The image of a bicycle with training wheels is from Wikimedia Commons, and the gears are a colorized version of an image from Openclipart.

How the speech timer at Toastmasters club meetings could provide useful feedback rather than just warning signals – introducing the 21st Century Timing Cards

If you attend a Toastmasters International club meeting, you will hear the Timer describe his role. Along with using a stopwatch for timing, he (or she) silently signals the Speaker (or Table Topics Speaker, or Speech Evaluator) when they have reached three times:

A]  The minimum specified time (green).

B]  The middle of the time range (yellow).

C]  The maximum specified time (red).

This typically is done using the $ 2.50 flipbook of hand held 6” x 8” Timing Cards (Item 901), which simulate a traffic light. Some clubs instead have fancy manual light boxes like traffic lights, which you can buy for $130 at Amazon or on eBay, or even more expensive automatic timer-controller light boxes.

For example, for the eight five-to-seven minute speeches in the basic Competent Communication manual the green card is shown after five minutes, the yellow card is shown after six minutes, and the red card is shown after seven minutes. But why do we do this?

Toastmasters have been seduced by speech contests and traffic lights.

The rules for speech contests say that:

“Timers shall provide warning signals to the contestants, which shall be clearly visible to the speakers but not obvious to the audience.”

Traffic lights are such a powerful early 20th century idea that we forget to ask why the Timing Cards that simulate them also are being used in regular club meetings. Those warning signals are reasonable for the experienced speakers entering contests.

But they are insufficient for helping inexperienced speakers learn how to manage their time. Consider what might happen to an inexperienced, nervous speaker giving a five-to seven-minute speech. He walks up to the lectern and shakes the Toastmaster’s hand. Just before starting to speak he meant to push the start button for the stopwatch function on his wristwatch, but instead he either missed or hit it twice - so his stopwatch isn’t running. Now he doesn’t know how much time he has left. He’d like to have some feedback, but the Timer hasn’t been told how to do that before five minutes have passed (5/7 ths or 71% of the time). That is way too late, so that speaker justifiably feels both confused and misused. 

If you had a project manager that behaved as shown above, then you’d probably go to his boss and tell him that guy is demented and you don’t want to ever work with him again.

In a blog post on January 11, 2011 titled Timing lights for speakers, I discussed how we could make a progress bar light (as shown above) that would extend the traffic light idea to provide useful feedback once per minute, or more than twice as much as a traffic light. (That post was the fifth most popular one on this blog).

We can update the Timing Cards for the 21st century  to inexpensively provide the same feedback as a progress bar light. We will start with a black cover card followed by a series of four cards that display a white progress bar moving from left to right, as is shown above. Then come the green, yellow and red cards previously used. That prototype was made from poster board with white paper attached using two-sided tape. Tops of the cards were gang punched with four holes for 1” notebook rings. The card size was slightly enlarged to 7” x 9” to efficiently use up the 22” x 28” standard size for U.S. poster board. Elsewhere the A5 paper size might instead be used for cards. Materials for a set of these eight new cards will cost less than $5.    

As shown above, both lower corners of these 21st Century Timing Cards cards are beveled in ¼” steps so they are easy to flip over. (That modification is worth adding to your existing cards.)  

These new cards also can be held on an easel (like a miniature flipchart), as shown above. The vertical support is a 3/8” thick piece of 1-1/2” wide pine supporting a ¼” diameter wooden dowel rod. 

The sequence for using that series of eight 21st Century Timing Cards is shown above for a five-to-seven-minute speech.

For a four-to-six-minute Icebreaker speech, we just skip over the fifth all-white card, as shown above. 

For a one-to-two-minute Table Topics speech, or a two-to three-minute Speech Evaluation we also skip over the fifth all-white card and flip the black and white cards every quarter or half minute, as shown above.

I believe that these updated cards are a useful improvement for providing effective feedback to all speakers during club meetings. (They also give the Timer more useful work to do). Consider using them in your club, and tell me what you think. We can keep using the green-yellow-red warning signals just for speech contests.

The image of Taylor Reeh sitting behind a desk came from Wikimedia Commons. 

UPDATE

A follow-up post about comments at LinkedIn and my replies to them is here.