Like clock radios, kitchen timers are a frustrating category: they’re cheap, but mostly poorly designed.

Until recently, most digital clock radios (and this is still true of many) could only be set ahead, not back. So if you overshot the time you were trying to set the alarm for, all you could do was sit there with your fingers cramping on the buttons, waiting for it to roll around again. Why did anyone put up with this? I probably wasted hours of my life setting alarms this way.

Kitchen timers today are as bad as clock radios were ten years ago. Nearly every timer on the market has the same flaw. Here’s a typical one:

Those Hour, Minute, and Second buttons are murder. If you want to time 45 minutes, you have to either hit the Minute button 45 times, or hold it down and hope you don’t go over 45, or you’ll be back in clock radio hell. Why do these still exist? There’s better technology available right now.

Here’s a different approach:

The ring around the red timer face is a dial that you turn to set the timer. Unfortunately, the way it works is that first you set the hours, then the minutes, then the seconds, and you have to wait between each setting. Unacceptable. However, it’s easy to imagine a timer like this where you just spin it fast to advance the time a lot and spin it slow to advance it a little, like on a digital car radio with tuning knobs. Maybe something like this already exists.

This is the timer I use:

As you can see, it lets you enter the time just the same way you would on that wacky new technology known as a telephone keypad. If you want to time 13 minutes and 42 seconds, you punch 1-3-4-2 and you’re ready to roll. Furthermore, the Polder has a powerful fridge magnet and a satisfyingly loud beep.

The only thing it doesn’t have is multiple timers, although you could always buy more than one Polder.

Or, you could always get something like this:

Each of those analog timers can be removed from the base and stuck on the fridge. Now that is cool.