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 decided it would be more fun to make it a game.

Lickety Split is the visual musical timer that turns daily tasks into a beat-the-clock adventure, allowing parents to shift from being a child's task-master to instead being their champion.

Choose a task, start the timer, and watch as an animated hourglass counts down while classical music gently — then excitedly — accelerates. Kids feel the urgency without the pressure. When they beat the timer, everyone gets to celebrate. 🎉

Two kinds of timers:

⏱️ Beat the Timer — finish the task before the music and hourglass run out:
⏰ Ready to leave the house (5 minutes)
👕 Getting dressed
🌙 PJs on
🍽️ Getting ready for a meal
🧹 Cleaning up the room
🛏️ Making the bed

⏳ Countdown — turn waiting into a calm, visible experience:
🪥 Brushing teeth (a full two minutes!)
🔄 Taking turns
📚 Study time
📖 Reading time

➕ Custom Time — choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 or 20 minutes with a perfectly matched song ready to go. Great for any new task — or for those moments when a parent needs a few minutes before they're free: "Watch the timer and then we'll play together."
🎵 Custom Song — attach any song from your own music library to any task. Because you're choosing a song with its own length, it works as a custom length timer too.

Why it works:

For young children, time is an abstract concept that only makes sense when attached to something tangible. Research shows 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 and animated hourglass act as a gentle scaffold for attention and transitions, helping children develop a genuine sense of time at their own pace. Especially loved by parents of children with ADHD, autism, and sensory processing differences, where visual timers and clear auditory cues can make an enormous difference for children who experience time blindness or find transitions challenging — though 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
🧩 Children who benefit from visual and auditory structure
💼 Occupational therapists supporting children's daily living skills
🌍 Available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Korean and Chinese

Works fully offline. No ads, no trackers, no personal data collected — everything stays on your device.

Developed by parents and educational technologists, Lickety Split has been helping families build confident, independent children since 2011 — rooted in constructivist education and a genuine belief that children thrive when they feel capable, not pressured. We hope it brings a little more calm, and a lot more cheering, to your family's day.