On the Dot

Tips

Ways to score higher at On the Dot. Each tip rests on the game's own player data, on research into how people time intervals, or on both. The research is listed at the end, and the background is on Sense of time.

The first round

Wait longer than feels right on round 1. In the first round of a player's first game, 72.9% of stops came before the target, and the median stop came at 79.8% of it. The numbers fade after 1.5 seconds, but the stopwatch keeps running until you press Stop. Returning players do much better: in their games 2 to 4, the median first-round stop is 98.6% of the target.

The visible clock

Use the first second and a half to set your pace. The digits stay on screen until 1.50 and are gone by 2.00. Say "one" as the display passes 1.00, then keep the same beat after the numbers fade. Tapping studies show that people can keep a beat going after the clicks that set it have stopped (Wing & Kristofferson, 1973). The game's data can't test this tip, because every round shows the clock for the same length of time.

Counting

Count the seconds and judge only the fraction. Counting starts to help for intervals longer than about 1.2 seconds (Grondin, Meilleur-Wells & Lachance, 1999). With targets of 8 to 24 seconds, counting silently made every response tighter, and the gain grew with the length of the target (Hinton & Rao, 2004). Counting or singing cut the spread of 6- to 24-second reproductions to about a third of what non-musicians managed without a strategy (Grondin & Killeen, 2009).

Targets are never whole or quarter seconds, so the end of every round comes down to feel. For 9.37 seconds, stop a little over a third of a beat after "nine".

After a miss

Correct by more than feels natural. Misses repeat. After a round that ended more than 10% early, 69.4% of next rounds were early as well. After a round more than 10% late, 67.3% of next rounds were late again. If you stopped early, slow your count down; if you stopped late, speed it up. The data shows no sign of players overcorrecting.

Long targets

Hold the beat steady to the end. From round 2 on, the median stop on 11- to 14-second targets is 98.7% to 99.0% of the target, and about 54% of stops come early. On 5- to 10-second targets the split is roughly even. A 1.3% lean on a 14-second target is about 0.18 seconds.

Long targets are not harder to score well on. The typical miss is about 8% of the target at every length, so a 14-second round typically scores about the same as a 5-second one.

Focus and nerves

Play when you can give the round your full attention. Splitting attention between timing and another task makes produced intervals longer, more variable or both (Brown, 1997). Across 117 experiments, production was the timing task most affected by mental load (Block, Hancock & Zakay, 2010). A distracted round tends to run late.

Expect to stop early when you're keyed up. Arousal tends to speed up the internal clock (Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009). A faster clock reaches its count sooner, so produced intervals come out short (Penton-Voak et al., 1996). Most of this evidence comes from intervals under 2 seconds, so treat it as a lean to watch for, not a fixed correction.

Warming up

Play a practice game before the daily. Practice uses random targets and never touches the leaderboard or your streak. Players improve fast: of 1,440 players who finished at least two games, 78.7% scored higher in their second game, by a median of 6.2 points. In lab studies, feedback after each attempt improved interval production, apparently by adjusting the remembered target (Franssen & Vandierendonck, 2002). In the game, one round of feedback removes most of the first round's early lean: 65.9% of first rounds end early, against about 51% of second rounds.

You can also replay the daily game as often as you like. Only your best run of the day goes on the leaderboard.

Devices

Use whatever you have. Median round accuracy was 91.1% on phones and 90.3% on desktop computers. On a computer, the space bar starts and stops the clock.

Benchmarks

Half of all finished games score 89.9% or more. A 94.4% game is in the top quarter, 96.6% is in the top 10% and 97.5% is in the top 5%. Player data has the full spread.

Play today's game

Sources

Game figures are from 61,936 rounds played between 2 August and 5 October 2026. Player data explains how they were counted.