I'm wondering if I'm the only one somewhat bothered by the timer Skritter uses?

First, it stops at 30 seconds. If I practice re-writing a character four or five times, it doesn't matter... after 30 seconds, it stops ticking.

Second, it stops after you guess. If I encounter a new word, try an answer, then follow a link to a dictionary to look up the word, review example sentences, related words, etc, it only acknowledges the "time-to-guess" instead of total time used.

Third, it's hard to manage my daily study with a clock that only measures part of my study time. I find that in order to log 30 minutes of "time-to-guess" time, I sometimes have to spend twice that much total study time, and maybe more if I'm coming across lots of new words.

Is there a way to adjust the clock, or is this important for the SRS? Couldn't it log both "time-to-guess" and "overall" study time?

I would love to have a clock measuring overall study time - it would really help me to manage how much time I spend on Skritter and related things.

At the moment, what with writing mnemonics, checking Heisig and personal def.s of character primitives, looking in external dictionaries etc, I have pretty much given up on using the Skritter timer at all.

On the other hand, it does tell you how focused you're being. It is very good at gauging how effectively you use your time. For example, I set myself 25 minutes to work on Skritter. If by the end of it 15minutes have past on the Skritter clock, I know I haven't been focused enough. If it's 20 minutes, well, then that's much better.

Not arguing against you here, just showing some of its merits. However the clock's done is no big issue as far as I'm concerned.

I tend toward Byzanti's viewpoint. I can easily figure my overall study time myself, and the Skritter clock keeps a count of actual time on the program.

I think I understand why it's the way it is; if you are in the middle of studying and then stop to do something else but leave the practice page open, the time could sit there ticking away for hours, so they have to have a maximum time limit. But you're right, the numbers it's collecting aren't "correct" in any sense of the word.

You *can* use the numbers to compare how much time you spent studying on different days, as long as your study habits are roughly the same on the days in question.

James

I'm not saying it's great. In fact, it's pretty bogus. I've had it on my list to improve the time tracking for since July of last year so that there's seldom need for a hard limit and it will track how much you're actually studying by detecting when you're AFK. I've also got it to keep counting a little bit after you finish a prompt (but not too long) to account for a little bit of reflection time. As for tracking overall time on Skritter even with looking words up and making mnemonics and such: not sure whether that will be included.

But it's not a high priority still! So I don't know when I will do it.

To me it seems obvious Skritter time is always less than actual time. I hypothesize if Skritter time was made more accurate total study time (I mean actual time spent) of everyone on this site would go down. I dont think it works the other way though. If Skritter time became any slower than it is it would become too annoying for people to overlook.

All in all I feel things are okay as they are.

I've become accustomed to measuring myself on "skritter time" as jww1066 suggests; that is, comparing study time on different days. I wouldn't be happy if the algorithm got tweaked several times; if it is going to change, I would want it in a "big bang" so that I would not need to re-calibrate myself more than once.
I've also pondered whether I would want a prompt to automatically go to "wrong" after some time, perhaps configurable. I can do this now, of course, but it might keep me more honest if I had to change something from 'wrong' to 'right' after I struggled too long on a given character.