The ability to accurately assess the length of time required to tie or untie something (for tops) or the amount of time before needing to come out of a tie (for bottoms) is an essential skill to develop, and one that will evolve as you gain experience.
Experienced tops and bottoms can generally provide times within a minute or two at most. That’s a goal worth working towards. However, in the meantime, it’s important that you are honest with your partner about your ability to give or not give an accurate time estimate. If your partner believes your timing is precise, they can rely on that and calculate it into their warnings and times. If they know you’re not very sure, they can provide some extra padding in their warnings and times … and, of course, vice versa. But if they are relying on the time you provide and it’s not precise, you could end up in a problematic situation where the worst-case outcome is cutting rope or causing injury.
Therefore, we recommend practicing to improve your ability to provide accurate times.
For Tops
For tops, this means timing yourself as you tie and untie patterns that you commonly use. This will help you get a sense of your average time for various patterns. You can also apply this to more improvised tying by roughly equating the complexity of what you’re tying with specific patterns whose timing you already know.
It’s important to note that speed is not the focus for these activities, nor is this a competition. You’re not trying to find out how fast you can tie or untie a pattern, but instead, how long it typically takes you to tie and untie it well.
For Bottoms
For bottoms, this means timing how long you can reasonably and without injury sustain common positions (with and without load). For example, how long can you reasonably sustain a folded-leg tie, mid-hands box tie, armbinder, hogtie, etc.? And for more experienced bottoms, how long can you sustain that same tie when there’s pressure on the tie from partial or full suspension?
As with tops, remember that this isn’t a competition and the point is not to see how far you can push yourself. Instead, you’re looking for reliable times that are reasonable for you to sustain without injury. Each person will have a different definition of “reasonable,” and some people’s risk profile may include the chance of injury. However, you should still have a sense of what an “injury free” time is for yourself so that you can calculate that into whatever risks you’re willing to take in a specific interaction.
For an even more advanced version of this, realize that changing aspects of a tie can make them more–or less–sustainable. Further, while you may have given a time limit on one tie, how does your time in that tie influence the amount of time you’ll have in the next tie you have planned for your scene? Or, how does the “clock” that’s running on the leg tie impact the “clock” that’s running on the chest tie? The more experience you have consciously noticing these things, the better you’ll be able to assess and communicate, and the more you can focus on enjoying the time that you do have together.
A Cheat
During practice, it’s reasonable to actually use a timer to help you gain an accurate sense of the amount of time required to tie or untie, or the amount of time you can sustain a tie. However, when you’re not in a specific practice/lab mode, and when the energy and excitement of a scene start warping your perspective of time, how can you keep track?
One cheat that we particularly like for this comes from a bottoming panel at NARIX 2015. The panel recommended using songs to help you assess your time. In most “play” situations, and nearly always in public play spaces, there will be music. You can use the number of songs to help you determine the amount of time that has passed.
Contemporary popular songs tend to last between 3.5 to 5 minutes (source). So, if you’ve heard 3 songs since your interaction started, chances are that you’ve been tying for about 12 to 15 minutes or so. If you think you can sustain a tie for about one more song, you can provide a 3 minute warning (which gives you some cushion for unexpected delays) or just say that you need to come out “by the end of the next song.”
Practicing both methods, using an actual timer for accuracy and using songs to help you estimate, can be an excellent way to improve your ability to provide accurate time estimates to your partners.