How to Add a Clock to Notion
Two routes, and both take about a minute. The quick one is the Date and Time widget in your dashboard: pick a format, a font and colours, copy the link, embed it. The other is the text widget, which understands time codes, so you can lay the clock out however you like and pick from over 1,500 fonts.
The time codes
Type (hour):(minute):(second) in a text widget and it renders a live clock. Change the separators, put words around it, whatever you want. (day) (month) (year) gives you a live date the same way.
Why people use the text route
Because it carries the whole font library. This is where the how did they make their clock look like that setups come from. Same widget, different typeface, and nothing else to configure.
Embedding it
/embed on an empty line, paste, drag to size. Full steps in add a widget to Notion.
The clock reads the viewer's device, so a public page shows every visitor their own local time rather than yours. Usually what you want, occasionally a surprise.
Longer walkthrough on the blog: Notion clock widget.
How other tools do it
A clock is the most copied widget in the category, so Indify, Apption, WidgetBox and Blocs all have one and they mostly differ on typography. What is worth comparing is not the clock itself but whether you can restyle it later without rebuilding it and re-embedding everywhere.
Ours runs through the text widget, which is why the whole font library applies to it. That was an accident of design rather than something we set out to build, and it turned out to be the most used part of the widget.
One detail people ask about: the seconds tick smoothly rather than jumping, which sounds trivial and is the difference between a clock that looks alive and one that looks like a screenshot.