Lickety Split: Musical Timer

"We need to leave the house in five minutes." "Brush your teeth for two whole minutes." "For the umpteenth time, please pick up your toys."

Sound familiar? Telling a young child they have five minutes rarely works: five minutes feels different every time. So we made it a game.

Lickety Split is the visual musical timer that turns daily tasks into a beat-the-clock adventure, so parents can be their child's champion instead of their task-master. Choose a task and start the timer. Classical music plays for exactly as long as the task should take, gently and then excitedly speeding up, while an animated character acts out the task and a Time Disc drains as time runs out. Kids feel the urgency without the pressure. When they beat the timer, everyone celebrates.

Two kinds of timers:

Beat the Timer: finish before the music runs out.
- Ready to leave the house (5 minutes)
- Getting dressed
- PJs on
- Getting ready for a meal
- Cleaning up the room
- Making the bed

Count Down: turn waiting into a calm, visible experience.
- Brushing teeth (a full two minutes)
- Taking turns
- Study time
- Reading time

Anything Timer: choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 or 20 minutes, each with its own perfectly matched song. Great for any new task, or for "Watch the timer and then we'll play together."

Your Song, Your Length: time any task with a song from your own music.

Timey the hourglass is free, with 18 different rewards. Premium adds four more characters, a train, a unicorn, a bee and a caterpillar, each with its own short animated stories for both kinds of timer. Premium is an optional yearly subscription ($1.99 a year in the US), behind a grown-up question.

Made for small hands and busy grown-ups:
- Tap the timer to pause; resume, start over or go home
- Settings to hide the Time Disc or the numbers, skip the story intro or voice prompts, and choose what happens when time runs out
- Anything that changes how a timer works, opens a link or involves a purchase asks a grown-up question first

Why it works:

For young children, time is an abstract idea that only makes sense when it is attached to something they can see and hear. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for focus, self-regulation and executive function, is among the last parts of the brain to mature. Lickety Split meets children where they are: the accelerating music, the animation and the Time Disc act as a gentle scaffold for attention and transitions, helping children build a real sense of time at their own pace. Especially loved by parents of children with ADHD, autism and sensory processing differences, for whom visual timers and clear sound cues can make an enormous difference with time blindness and transitions. It was designed for all children, and works beautifully for every family.

Used and loved by:
- Families building morning routines, bedtime routines and homework habits
- Early childhood educators managing classroom transitions
- Occupational therapists supporting children's daily living skills

Available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Timers and music work fully offline. No ads, no tracking and no personal information collected: the app goes online only to verify purchases and send anonymous crash reports.

Developed by parents and educational technologists, Lickety Split has been helping families raise confident, independent children since 2011. We hope it brings a little more calm, and a lot more cheering, to your family's day.

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