Personally, I found it better to get established on the outbound heading and think to myself "Wings level, stopwatch running" (and double-check that it WAS running).
I might be out of date on this, but DAYNE and MIRSI at Manchester are the two holding fixes which come to mind, where the abeam position cannot be determined. Interestingly, there's an outbound limit at MIRSI - POL 30d - while there isn't one published for DAYNE.