Have you ever started a "quick task" that turned into hours?
Here's how it happens:
You sit down to write an email. Simple enough. But then you want to include a specific number to back up your point. "Let me just check that real quick," you think.
Forty-five minutes later, you're deep in a Python script, calculating statistics from a CSV file. The email? Still unfinished.
Without nested timers, you just see "Email task: 2 hours." With them, you see the real story: Email (5 min) → Research claim (10 min) → Write Python script (45 min) → Debug CSV parsing (30 min) → Format output (20 min).
That's when it hits you: "I'm 45 minutes into calculating a number for one line in an email. I could just say 'I estimate roughly 20%' and add a note that I can dig deeper if needed." While often the exact number matters. Sometimes, it doesn't.
Shopify Project: Watch a "simple" client project spiral into debugging sessions and infrastructure work. Notice how the actual time (5 hours) dwarfs the planned time (4 hours).
Nested Timers Project: See how building this very tool revealed its own need—unexpected detours into text editor research and documentation rewrites.
How to use: Click any timer to edit. Click "Add Timer" bars to add subtasks. Parent timers auto-start with children. Stop a parent to stop all its subtasks.