School gates open at half three in most of the country, and the pavement outside fills up in the ten minutes before. Getting there without either sprinting or standing about for twenty minutes is a matter of leaving at the right moment. This page counts down to 4:45 pm exactly, second by second.
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.
Twelve o'clock is where the 12-hour clock is at its weakest, since 12 am and 12 pm are read the wrong way round often enough to cause real trouble. Writing a time as 16:45 removes the problem outright, because a 24-hour figure only ever points at one moment in the day.
Common questions
What happens if 4:45 pm has already gone for today?
The count simply carries on towards the next occurrence, which is tomorrow. That rollover happens on its own — the page does not need reloading and there is nothing to reset by hand.
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 4:45 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.
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