3 minutes timer

What a 3-minute timer is good for

Three minutes is the classic egg-timer interval and the length of a great many small kitchen and household jobs. It is also a round in amateur boxing, the upper end of a strong plank, and a comfortable window for a focused breathing exercise. Long enough to matter, short enough to hold your attention without drifting.

• •Soft-boiling an egg (about three minutes for a runny yolk)
• •Steeping black tea to full strength without bitterness
• •A three-minute boxing or HIIT round
• •Rinsing a hair mask or letting a face mask set
• •A short, structured break to stretch and refill water

The three-minute egg, precisely

The three-minute egg is a cooking benchmark for a reason: starting from boiling water, three minutes gives a set white and a fully runny yolk, ideal for dipping soldiers. Add a minute for a jammy yolk and two for a firmer set. The variables are egg size, starting temperature, and altitude, a fridge-cold large egg needs slightly longer than a room-temperature medium one, and water boils cooler at altitude so the timing stretches. Because those variables are small, a reliable three-minute countdown gets you most of the way to a repeatable result; note the timing that works in your kitchen and you can reproduce it exactly every morning.

How this 3-minute timer stays accurate

Most browser timers drift, because they count by accumulating small ticks, and browsers deliberately slow those ticks down in background tabs to save battery. This one is different: the moment you press start it records the exact wall-clock time the countdown should end, and every frame it simply measures how long is left until that fixed end time. If you switch tabs, lock your phone, or the tab is throttled, the remaining time is recomputed from the real clock the instant you come back, so a 3-minute timer is still a 3 minutes timer rather than however long the throttled ticks happened to add up to. On phones the page asks for a screen wake lock while the countdown is running, where the browser allows it, so the display does not sleep mid-count. The alarm is synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API, which means there is no audio file to download and the chime is ready the moment you start.

Other timer lengths

Need a different length? These are the timers people most often reach for alongside a 3-minute timer:

• 2 minutes timer
• 5 minutes timer
• 10 minutes timer

Frequently asked questions

Three minutes from cold water or boiling water?

The classic three-minute egg is timed from the moment the egg goes into already-boiling water, not from cold. If you start in cold water and bring it to the boil, you need to time from when the water reaches a rolling boil instead.

Is three minutes a standard boxing round?

Professional men's boxing uses three-minute rounds with a one-minute rest. Amateur and women's bouts often use shorter rounds, but three minutes on with one minute off is the canonical pattern this timer matches.

Does the timer keep running if my phone locks?

The countdown is anchored to a fixed end time, so it stays correct even if the screen sleeps. For the alarm to sound reliably on mobile, keep the page open and the screen awake; this page requests a wake lock on browsers that support it.

Does the 3-minute timer work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded, the countdown runs entirely in your browser using your device clock, so it keeps working with no connection. The alarm is generated in the browser too, so there is no sound file to download.