Is there a website/app blocker that limits session length?

• 3 minute read

I’ve looked at dozens of website/app blockers and none of them have a very obvious feature:

Limit the session length for an app, with a cooldown.

For example, I never want to spend more than 10 minutes at a time on Twitter, and I never want to check Twitter more than once an hour. Other than that, I don’t care much when / how much I use Twitter.

The two main features of website/app blockers are:

  1. Daily time allowances (eg. Apple’s Screen Time)

  2. Scheduled focus blocks (eg. Opal)

The problem with daily time allowances is that it requires me to budget how I use my time allowance throughout the day. If I could already do that well, I wouldn’t want a website/app blocker!

For example, suppose I allow myself 45 minutes of Twitter per day. Inevitably I’ll use that all before 5pm because the endless scroll sucks me in and my sessions last longer than they should.

Then I get home after a long day in the code mines and, what, I’m not going to scroll Twitter a bit? That doesn’t sound fair. I’m going to ignore my allowance for the rest of the day. And now I’m numb to my daily time allowances.

A daily time cap isn’t a bad idea, it’s just insufficient. A session limit without a daily allowance will reduce daily time spent more than a daily allowance without a session limit.

And the problem with scheduled focus blocks is that there is never a good time to spend 2 hours scrolling Instagram Reels. That always feels bad, even if I had a great 4 hour focused work session earlier in the day.

And focusing during work sessions isn’t my problem. My problem is that I’ll have a few minutes of downtime after work, perfect to for a Twitter pulse check, and the next thing I know it’s 45 minutes later, time for dinner, and I’ve missed my window to clean my apartment or read.

Session lengths with a cooldown preserve my freedom to use my devices how I want - without tracking a block schedule or a time budget - without the risk that I’ll accidentally squander an evening on an infinite scroll app.

Someone should build this. In the meantime, I’m using Cold Turkey Blocker on macOS to create 24 hour-long blocks (one for every hour) with 15 minute allowances. It’s kind of close to what I want.