On reading again this comment might have missed some pieces. Background thought was, that my second tester does some very complicated programming, and tends to get thrown out of flow by a alarm going of. So for her a upward counter (a countup?) would work better.

When someone has an aversion to being times, he might be able to find a different way to quantify success. Two ideas are: a) getting the habit of starting n number of times till it feels like something has been done or b) getting a certain number of items done, without timing them.

I experience a) when for some reason my timer does not work. There is a rule I have against checking it - to prevent getting anxious about how little time has passed. But when it does not ring after an hour I notice that.