Remote workshops come with their own set of challenges. An often overlooked one is how to get everyone back at a certain time. If you focus on the exercise you easily miss the agreed time to come back. That is even before we start with time zones and specialities like half-hour deviations from standard time (as they occur in parts of Australia).
A nice solution to this problem is mobti.me. This free service is a remote timer for mob (or ensemble) programming. Without any modification we can reuse this service for anything that needs a timer.
Go to mobti.me where you see a random timer that changes every few seconds:
If you have a name you like (or one you provided yourself) you can click on get started and configure your timer. You can set the duration in the tab TIMER SETTINGS or enter the names of your team for mob programming:
You can now share the link to your timer with the participants of your workshop. When you need the timer, you click on START TURN and the countdown begins. Everyone who is on the timer page has now the same timer and gets an alarm when the time is over:
I like this timer because you can start right away. A tiny bit of configuration on your end is all it takes while the participants only need to open a web page. It cannot be much simpler.