How To Limit Your Own Access To Apps and Websites On a Mac

You can use ScreenTime on your Mac to limit the amount of time you spend looking at apps or websites. While it is easy to override restrictions you place on yourself, these techniques can still be useful for those looking to manager their time better.


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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to limit your own access to apps and websites on your Mac.
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So sometimes people like to limit their own access to apps and websites on their Mac. Maybe it's to keep themselves away from reading too much news or checking social media or their email or playing games. You can use the Screen Time function built into macOS to do this. To access Screen Time go to the Apple Menu and then System Preferences. Then look for Screen Time. Once you enter the controls here you'll see various things on the left. The simplest way to limit your access to apps and websites is to use App Limits. Select that. But first you must turn on Screen Time. If you don't have it On already you can turn it On by going to Options here and then selecting Turn On. One option here you may want to set is Share Across Devices. So if you're going to limit your access to websites or apps having this on will also limit those on other Macs you may have and iPhone and iPad as well.
Now let's go back to App Limits. You can add a limit by clicking the Plus button right here. You have a categorized list of all your apps here. So let's start by adding an app. Say I want to limit my access to the News App because I'm reading too much news. So I can Search for News. It's the quickest way to find it. I'm going to use the checkbox here and then I'm going to set a time limit so I can say, limit everyday to only one hour to checking the News App. Then I can press Done. If you ever want to disable the limit you can just uncheck it right there. It will keep it in the list so you can reenable it easily. You can also select it and then select Edit Limit and then change the amount. To test here let's go to one minute instead so we can see it in action. Let's go into the News App here and you can see after a minute goes by it's going to enact that restriction on me. So that's what happens when the time expires. Now you can simply hit OK and it will quit the app. If you try to launch it again you can see it's grayed out here. I can launch it but it's still going to come up with the same message. But I can click the Ignore Limit button. I can add one more minute. I can have it Remind me in 15 minutes or Ignore the Limit for Today.
So of course it's worth noting that this still takes discipline. This is really no more than a reminder to you to stop using the App based on the preferences you set. You can still override this, of course. It's your computer. You can override this and keep viewing the App. This is different than setting Parental Controls for another user on your Mac. This is basically doing yourself limits. In the end you're going to have to rely on yourself not to simply override the limit. Still a lot of people find this useful as a tool for managing their time.
Now note you can also set this up to be multiple apps. So I can select Edit here and edit the apps to go back to this screen. I can add, say, another app. Maybe I find myself using the Stocks App to read news after my limit is up. So I can add the Stocks App and this one minute limit is now set to News and Stocks. Both Apps. Note that by grouping them together here they really are grouped together when calculating the time. So say if I set this for one hour and I spend a hour looking at the News App I now won't be able to use the Stocks App without overriding it. Whereas if I made them two separate listings here then I could use the News App for a hour and the Stocks App for a separate hour.
Now if I wanted to add a website to this I could. I could select, instead of an app, go down to the bottom here and there's Websites. I can open this up here and it will allow me to add a website to this list. So, for instance, I could limit my time falling into rabbit holes in Wikipedia. Set that to one hour. Done. So now it will only let me browse wikipedia.org for one hour a day. So here's what happens when you're at Wikipedia browsing around and you run into your time limit. (Fast forwarding through one minute.) You get this and then the same kind of button. Notice I can go to another website. I'll open up another tab here and go to MacMost and I can do that fine. I can close the Wikipedia page there and let's go to wikipedia.org separately and you could see it recognizes I'm back at the site and puts this screen up instead of the webpage.
Note that this is for Safari. Third party browsers don't connect with this at all. You're not restricting what a third party app can do. So if you have Chrome or FireFox or something installed on your Mac it's not going to know anything about this restriction. But of course you can always override it on Safari as well. It still requires you to have discipline in order to use this to manage your time.
Also with any of these when you look at the time instead of everyday you can select Custom and then Edit and you could select a different limit for every day of the week. So, for instance, Monday through Friday you could limit your access to an app or a website to a hour but Saturday and Sunday you can set that limit to 24 hours or 8 hours or whatever you want.
Now there is another way to do this. You can use Downtime right here if you like instead. So you can turn Downtime On right now or you could schedule it which would make sense if you're trying to manage your time. So you can schedule it for everyday or Custom set a different time arrange for every day of the week. This would be your set Downtime. So, for instance, it shows here from the Evening to the Morning. So preventing you from using your Mac or other devices when maybe you should be sleeping. You can set it for evening hours. If you want to restrict yourself from using somethings after, say, six o'clock you could set the time to six o'clock here instead. Now it seems to suggest that it will restrict you from using your devices entirely. That's kind of the default. But if you go to Always Allow here you can allow some things. So you could see FaceTime and also Messages are allowed. Maps as well. But you could add other apps. So if you want to stop yourself from using your work apps in the evening then, maybe, you could turn some other apps On and when Downtime hits then you won't be able to use your work apps. But you could also do the opposite that. You could restrict, say, some games and other entertainment software, social media, things like that. Only allow those after work instead of during the day. So if you basically want to have two modes, one where you can access everything on your Mac and another where you're extremely restricted then Downtime with Always Allow set to specific apps might be the way to go.
Otherwise using App Limits is a great way to highly customize things for each individual app and even websites. So there's how you can combine Screen Time mixed with some discipline to limit how you use your Mac throughout the day. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
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