In this article, the author describes a week of "timely" open-ended lessons with a high ability Y9 group of boys. He gives lessons that would give the students some sense of purpose, as they try to generate a mathematical entity to represent something they used regularly. He states that understanding metric time is something his students really need to do and so this motivated them to explore time and decimal system from a different perspective. The author realized that he needed to develop further strategies for encouraging all students to engage-- hoping that perhaps this could involve giving them an outline for a particular investigation or more generic problem-solving advice in the form of some of Polya's strategies. Since the author did feel that the tasks did not provide enough motivation for most of the students, he has decided to design a series of lessons in which the ultimate aim is for students to build a virtual clock in a dynamic geometry package. The hope is that the new lessons would require similar skills, but would provide a more motivating environment. (Contains 5 notes.)