Timer/stopwatch in Ubuntu 14.04 Unity?

Have you tried "stopwatch"?

Terminal install command if you dislike the GUI:

sudo apt-get install stopwatch

It is also easily installable from your Ubuntu software center. You find it by typing stopwatch in the search window. Or if you prefer, you can also find it in the synaptic package manager.

The following link tells you more about it, although it is entirely the same information you'd see if you opened the Ubuntu Software Manager.

https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/precise/stopwatch/

Gnome Clocks is good and installs easily through the Ubuntu software manager, at least on 18.04, or from the command line through sudo apt install gnome-clocks. It has fairly few dependencies (at least no Gnome Shell required).

It has a stopwatch and a timer, plus world clocks and alarms:

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-clocks/stable/

The online stopwatch and timer is good and easy but seems to take significant cpu in chrome. Gnome Clocks is very low on cpu overhead.

A quick search in Synaptic shows a few timers here, gtimer (appears standalone, looks to have several options & timers), stopwatch looks good, gnome-shell-timer (for gnome-shell, probably won't work in Unity), ktimer (has lots of KDE dependencies), xfce4-timer-plugin.

Do any of those look good enough?

In case they're not showing up for you, even after an apt-get update maybe you don't have all the repository components selected (main universe restricted multiverse). See this link for info on Repositories https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu