@Mandy_Kerr If you go into Keynote's preferences, you can "Allow Mission Control, Dashboard and others to use the screen" while presenting.
This lets you ⌘tab to other applications and back again, while presenting... without the timer resetting. 🥳
My tweets and posts live here on my own domain these days.
You can explore them here and follow me on Mastodon instead of Twitter where I'm not currently active.