It is good that you ask. Just remember that the internet has WAY more information than people do. I use WowWiki for my macro info along with the UI forums. reset has target/combat/time/modifier resets. So you can use CTRL and ALT and SHIFT if you want to force a reset. I am pretty sure that time was changed recently (4-5 months) to be a time since last keypress. I wish and it used to be a time since macro started reset. But they didn't want people to use it for cooldowns. It used to reset based on time since macro start, now I am pretty sure it works on time since last keypress. I just set it moderately shorter than the cooldown and just accept the action is not ready errors. Another way for short cooldowns is to make it rotate through back to the beginning. By then the cooldown should be done. Another way is to use a timer. The new clock Blizzard added has a timer feature so you can put a timer for 10 secs and make it ding/beep/etc so you know when a timer is done (cooldown is done).

Hope that helps. Good luck.