A Screen Time setup that survives you: twelve minutes, done once

You set Screen Time up in a good mood, and it has not stopped you once.

That is usually not a discipline problem. Screen Time has an order to it, and the two switches that turn a limit into an actual limit do not appear on screen until a passcode exists. Set your limits first, the way almost everybody does, and those switches are not hidden from you. They are simply not there. What you end up with is a version of Screen Time that mentions the limit, shrugs, and gets out of your way.

So this is how to set up Screen Time properly on an iPhone: the whole thing, in the order it has to happen, with the seconds attached to each part. About twelve minutes, once. At the end are the two settings that undo every one of the others, and neither of them turns up in a setup guide.

The eight settings worth turning on, in the order they have to go in

1. Turn Screen Time on properly. Settings › Screen Time. If the top of that screen is offering you a button to turn on App & Website Activity, press it before anything else. Nothing below works without it. 20 seconds.
2. Set the passcode. Screen Time › Lock Screen Time Settings. Four digits your thumb does not already know. 90 seconds.
3. Downtime, on the hour you actually lose. Screen Time › Downtime, switch on Scheduled, then Block at Downtime. 2 minutes.
4. One App Limit, four apps, one budget. Screen Time › App Limits › Add Limit, then reopen the limit and switch on Block at End of Limit. 3 minutes.
5. Cut Always Allowed back. Screen Time › Always Allowed. Everything on that list walks straight through Downtime. 60 seconds.
6. Close the delete and reinstall loop. Screen Time › Content & Privacy Restrictions › iTunes & App Store Purchases › Deleting Apps › Don't Allow. 45 seconds.
7. Share Across Devices, on. Screen Time › Share Across Devices. Otherwise the iPad on the sofa is a phone with no rules on it. 20 seconds.
8. Notifications off for the four apps. Settings › Notifications, each app, Allow Notifications off. 2 minutes.

That is eleven minutes of tapping and twelve with the scrolling. If you only have two minutes right now, do steps two and four and come back for the rest. The order below is not decorative; steps three and four are missing a toggle each until step two is done.

Two switches do not exist until the passcode does

Settings › Screen Time › Lock Screen Time Settings. On older versions of iOS the row reads Use Screen Time Passcode instead. Same four digits, same job.

Pick digits your thumb has never typed. Not your phone passcode, not the first four of it, not the year you were born. What you are buying with this setting is half a second of conscious effort at eleven at night, and muscle memory eats half a second without chewing.

Now go back into Downtime, and into any App Limit. There are two toggles there that were not there ten minutes ago: Block at Downtime and Block at End of Limit. Turn both on. If you cannot see them, the passcode did not take, because these two only exist once one does.

Without those toggles, the end of a limit is a grey screen with a button on it. A button is not a wall.

That grey screen and its button have an article to themselves, because taking the button away is the single highest value ninety seconds on the phone: Ignore Limit is the whole problem.

Set Downtime for the hour you actually lose

Most people schedule Downtime from bedtime until breakfast, which sounds responsible and mostly covers eight hours they were asleep for anyway.

Find the real hour first. Open Settings › Screen Time and tap the chart at the top to open the full report, then look at a single day. The bars are hour by hour. There will be one tall one, and it is usually earlier than you expect: the hour after you sat down, not the hour before you gave up.

Then Settings › Screen Time › Downtime, switch on Scheduled, and set it around that hour with thirty minutes of margin on each side. Customize Days is there for when Tuesday and Saturday are different animals, and they usually are. The phone warns you five minutes before Downtime starts, which is either courteous or diabolical depending on the evening.

If you are not certain Downtime is even the tool you want, stop and settle that before you build anything, because picking the wrong one of the three is the most common way this whole setup quietly fails: Downtime, App Limits, or Always Allowed.

One limit, four apps, and a budget they have to share

Settings › Screen Time › App Limits › Add Limit shows you categories. Open a category and pick the individual apps inside it rather than taking the whole thing, because Social is forty apps and thirty six of them never did anything to you.

Pick four. Put all four inside one limit. A limit counts the total across everything in it, so four apps sharing forty five minutes is a budget, while four separate forty five minute limits is three hours. People build the second one by accident all the time and then wonder why the day still went.

Set the number lower than feels reasonable, because the number that feels reasonable is roughly the number you already do. Then reopen the limit and switch on Block at End of Limit. Limits reset at midnight local time, which is worth knowing before you decide what a day means to you.

Always Allowed is an exemption list, and it outranks Downtime

Settings › Screen Time › Always Allowed is the list of apps that stay open while Downtime is running. On a phone nobody has edited it tends to be Phone, Messages, FaceTime and Maps, which is sensible.

It stops being sensible the first evening you get shut out of something at nine forty, drop that app onto the list to get through the moment, and never take it off again. Six months later the list is nine apps long, and every single one of them carries a note from a tired version of you saying this one is fine.

Cut it back to what you would genuinely want at three in the morning. Leave Phone. Messages is the one to think hardest about, because for a lot of people Messages stopped being a phone feature and became a feed.

The four digits have a back door, and you fitted it yourself

When you set the Screen Time passcode, iOS asks for your Apple Account so the passcode can be reset if you ever forget it. Almost everybody fills that in, because the alternative sounds reckless.

Be clear about what you agreed to. On the passcode screen there is a line of small text reading Forgot Passcode?. Tap it, prove you are you, and the passcode goes, and everything it was protecting goes with it. That is not a hack anyone found. It is the supported route, it takes under a minute, and the person who uses it at eleven at night will be you, feeling completely reasonable the whole way through.

You can decline recovery when you set the passcode: there is a Cancel on that screen. Know the price before you take it. Skip recovery, forget the digits, and the only road back is erasing the phone and setting it up from scratch. A few people want that trade. Most should leave it alone.

Three more that take under three minutes between them

Deleting apps. Screen Time › Content & Privacy Restrictions › iTunes & App Store Purchases › Deleting Apps › Don't Allow. A limit is attached to an app, so deleting the app deletes the limit, and the reinstall ninety seconds later arrives clean and still logged in. This closes that. The side effect is that you cannot delete any app until you switch it back, which is mildly annoying twice a year.

Share Across Devices. Screen Time › Share Across Devices. Your limits then apply on everything signed in to the same Apple Account. Leave it off and you have built a careful fence around one of your screens.

Notifications. Settings › Notifications, then each of the four apps from your limit, then Allow Notifications off. Not scheduled, not quiet. Off. A notification is a piece of the feed delivered to the outside of the door, and reading it never required you to open anything.

Websites are a separate job, and not today's

An App Limit limits the app. It does not know the website version exists, so the whole thing is sitting in Safari about four seconds after the shield appears. There is a Websites field buried inside App Limits that deals with this, and a stricter route through Content & Privacy Restrictions, and both are fiddly enough to deserve their own sitting: how to block a website on an iPhone. Do that next weekend. Doing it now is how people lose the twelve minutes they just spent.

What twelve minutes buys, and where it stops

It buys the gap. Before this, opening the app was one thumb and no thought. After it, the same reflex hits a grey screen, and getting past that screen takes four digits and about eight seconds of being properly awake. Eight seconds is where most evenings are actually decided.

What it does not buy is a wall. Read back up the list and notice that every lock on it opens for the same person: you, holding the phone, knowing the digits, entitled to change any of it whenever you feel like it. iOS is not being sloppy here. It genuinely cannot tell the difference between the person who set the limit and the person hitting it, because they have the same face, the same thumb and the same Apple Account, and it is right to believe them both.

Which is why the thing that actually helps is a third party. Someone who was not in the room when the rule was made and is not moved by how the day went.

That can be a person. Hand the passcode to your partner and make them type it, and it works alarmingly well, and it costs you something socially every single time you ask.

Or it can be a small dog, which is the part where we admit we make one. Scrappy stands in front of the apps you name and does not have your passcode, because he does not want it. First knock he is polite. Fourth knock he is standing on the doorknob. Getting past him costs a treat, and a treat costs about two thousand steps of real walking. Treats cannot be bought. We will never sell them, at any price, in any version.

He knows three rules and no fourth. Two of them you just built under Apple's names: quiet hours is Downtime, a daily limit is an App Limit. The third one iOS does not have at all, and it is often the one that matters most: an open limit, where six looks a day is plenty and the seventh gets a dog. He has his own version of step six as well, and switching that off takes a day, which is deliberately longer than an urge lasts.