A three o'clock kick-off has been the shape of a Saturday afternoon for generations, and everything else on that day tends to arrange itself around it. If 2:40 pm is the point something starts, this page tracks the precise gap remaining, rather than leaving you to work backwards from the clock on the wall.
Rather than rounding to the nearest minute, the count tracks hours, minutes and seconds the whole way down, in one line. That precision matters most in the last stretch, when the minutes turn into single figures and the difference between leaving now and leaving shortly stops being academic and starts costing you the train.
Said out loud, 2:40 pm usually comes out as twenty to three in the afternoon rather than as a string of digits. Spoken and written time diverge more than people expect, which is worth remembering when somebody tells you a time over the phone and you are trying to match it against something printed.
Common questions
Which clock does it use?
Your own. It reads the local time and time zone from the device you are looking at, so the figure reflects where you actually are rather than a fixed zone written into the page.
Will this alert me when the time arrives?
No. It is a live number rather than an alarm — nothing rings, buzzes or notifies you at zero. If you need to be interrupted at 2:40 pm, set an alarm as well and treat this page as the running total.
Is it affected by the clocks changing?
Only in the sense that your device is. When the change between GMT and BST happens at the end of March and October, the device adjusts and the countdown follows it without anything to do here.
What is 14:40 in the 12-hour clock?
That is 2:40 pm, or twenty to three in the afternoon if you are saying it aloud. From 13:00 onwards, subtracting twelve gives the pm figure — the same moment written three different ways.
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