Kitchen timer, if you don't care about the noise it makes. But I must say, timed meditation sounds like torture to me.
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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Meditation
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I often do meditation without a timer too. But I find it a good practice to try and do a certain amount of time, instead of however much you feel like. As that quickly turns into stopping meditation early to chase some interesting thought/idea.
Also, when meditating in the morning, it's good to know when you need to stop and start getting ready to go out. Otherwise I would be late very often.
Kitchen timer would probably scare the hell out of my partner. We have a very noisy one!
You could also use a clock. Just set an alarm for 1 hour in the future.
I am sitting in the same room as my partner who is getting ready to sleep, so that's why I always used an alarm without sound on my phone. But now I would like to get rid of the phone too.
Maybe an hourglass?
You can use a watch / fitness tracker. There are extremely cheap and good ones (xiaomi band 10 for example is like 40 USD) that can do timers, alarms, buzz you for notifications, etc. My partner and I have had muted devices for many years now due to watches.
This is actually quite a good option. I think even a regular watch with a timer option would be great (and then you don't need all the tracking/bluetooth connection and whatnot)
But I suppose regular watches usually don't have a vibrating alarm, only an audible one. I guess that's because that uses more battery
People somehow managed this in the past before phones existed right?
Incense sticks
This is the way.
Once you stop smelling the stick you're done
I find it quite difficult to notice however. And maybe if your mind is drifting a bit, you might not realise it's already gone.
But I suppose this is something that improves if you do it regularly that way
I like this incent stick idea. Also you could play a meditation track that is an hour long and you will know it's over when you don't hear it. That's the audio equivalent
Something else I've heard about is a water clock, which is basically just a pot of water with a small hole in it, where trips of water will fall out into a small bowl.
You basically fill up the pot of water depending on how long you want to sit and then it will start dripping on the bowl making dripping sound and then when the dripping sound stops you know it's time to stop
You can always just use your body timer - sit until your mind gets sluggish or you feel like you've stopped making progress. Usually this happens arount 45m to 1h for most people.
Watch timer / alarm also works.
Body timer does work for me. But obviously there are days where your mind immediately feels sluggish, and in those cases I would like to keep trying, at least for a bit (to see whether my mind is just trying to avoid meditation)
Also, over time, it takes longer and longer to reach a point where your body complains or your mind finds it difficult to continue. For me this point is typically already longer than 1 hour, so not really good if I want to do a shorter meditation.
Alarm I used in the past, but only a silent one on my phone (I don't want to wake up my partner)
Give it a try with no timer. After doing it for years I didn’t have access to a timer and just went for it and I was really surprised how accurately I was able to know when to open my eyes. You know that feeling of anticipation shortly before the bell? Make that your clock!
I will try this, hope I don't accidentally spend 6 hours meditating