The Format function produces a human readable string of text (in Variant
form), not a date/time. Dates and times in VB are actually stored in as a
Double... the whole number part represents the number of days since "date
zero" (which is 12/30/1899) and the decimal part represents the fraction of
a 24-hour day; so formatting the Now function does nothing to aid you in
your goal. VB provides a rich set of Date manipulation functions which you
might want to familiarize yourself with in the help files (use "date
functions", with the quotes, when searching the VBA editor's help files).
Now, to answer your question, I would use this...
mytime = DateAdd("s", 40, Now)