Laura Gurfein's vanity is always cluttered with a dozen-plus products: BB cream, concealer, blush, setting powder, setting spray, brow pencil or gel, eyeshadow, liquid eyeliner, eye pencil, mascara, plus lip liner, lipstick, and gloss, all applied in sequence. In her Apartment Therapy piece, she admits the issue isn't that she uses too much stuff—it's that she never knows how long it actually takes to go from bare face to full face. Sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes it's over 20, and once she's in the zone, all sense of time just disappears.
She realized the problem was her bathroom—the one room in her home with no visible time display. Her phone is almost always within reach, but she only glances at the screen while skipping podcast ads. What she needed was a way to track time without ever putting down her makeup brush. So she took the Loftie clock that used to sit on her nightstand (displaced once she started testing a sunrise alarm clock) and moved it onto her toilet tank, right next to the tissue box and a mini bottle of Poo-Pourri—perfectly positioned within her peripheral vision when she looks at the bathroom mirror. Ever since, she's been fully aware of how long each step takes, and getting out the door on time has become much easier.
She's also quick to point out: you don't need to spend $170 on a bathroom clock—that was just the trap she fell into herself. The only real rule is that the clock needs to be placed somewhere visible when you're looking in the mirror—not on a wall you never face, and not on the counter behind you.
