One Percent Inspiration, Zero Percent Perspiration

Because I work in advertising (surprise!), I often write radio or TV spots where I have to know precisely how long sentences take to say.

To make something fit in the 10, 15, 30, whatever number of seconds it has to be is a constant struggle with a stopwatch. Even a quarter of a second can actually make a huge difference. And easy as it is to use a stopwatch, hitting that start/stop button gets aggravating, and less precise than you'd hope.

This would make my life easier. Here's how it would work: set it to the "voice" function, and hold it up like a microphone. It detects when you start speaking and automatically begins keeping time. Then it detects when you've stopped speaking - stopping the count after, say, one second of silence (so it won't just stop at any pause in the middle of a sentence), and then counting back to last sound it detected.

Let's call it the Copywriter's Stopwatch, maybe. Anyway, I know it would be useless for many people, but definitely not for me.