The whole point of a clock widget is that you can glance at it. Mine kept disappearing. Scroll down a Notion page, switch tabs, open another app, and the clock is suddenly somewhere else, waiting to be found again.
It was a small annoyance, but exactly the kind that makes a useful widget feel less useful. So the question became: could the clock leave its box and follow you?
Notion says no, at least inside the page. Every embedded widget lives in a fixed block, with no permission to float over the rest of Notion. A little window of its own was the closest way around it.
Three attempts and one small escape
Three approaches went through the awkward real-life test: inside a Notion embed, in the desktop app, and in Chrome and Safari.
- A floating interactive window never made it past Notion’s embed restrictions.
- A regular pop-up was blocked by the Notion desktop app, and it disappeared behind other windows.
- Picture-in-picture, the tiny window browsers use for video, worked in every place tested.
Turning a widget into a tiny video
Picture-in-picture only understands video. Soft Clock and Focus Timer are not videos, so each widget now quietly redraws itself into one and sends that to the floating window.
It is a slightly odd trick, but it keeps the details that make the widgets feel like themselves. Soft Clock carries over its clock face, colours, fonts, time and date. Focus Timer keeps its countdown ring and shows when a session is paused or finished.
There is one limit. The floating version is something to glance at, not something to prod. You can close it, but the buttons and checkboxes stay back in the original widget. That makes it a natural home for clocks and timers. Other widgets will need to earn their place up there.
Try it on your page
The setting lives in the widget’s customise page under Float on top. Nothing floats until you choose it. It is part of full customisation, which comes with every widget you buy and with the one widget a free account can customise. Start with Soft Clock or Focus Timer.
So far, it has been tested in Chrome, Safari and the Notion desktop app on a Mac. If a browser cannot float the widget, the button simply stays out of the way.
There are plenty of widgets that would make no sense as a floating window, and a few that might be lovely. If one comes to mind, tell me which one.