Your phone limit is working perfectly. You are reading this on the laptop.

Nothing broke. You built a wall across one door of a two-door room, and the habit used the other door without breaking stride. The wall is still standing. It is still doing its job. It is simply not where you are.

Most people take this as proof that screen time apps do not work, and that is the wrong conclusion drawn from the right evidence. What you actually have is a measurement problem sitting on top of a coverage problem. Both are worth an afternoon, and the measurement one takes two minutes.

Two minutes that tell you whether you fixed it or just moved it

Before any argument, the check. On the Mac: Apple menu, System Settings › Screen Time. The top of that pane has App Usage. Open it and set the range to the last week.

Now find the day you set the limit on your phone, and read the four days after it. You are looking for one shape only: a browser that got busier. If Safari or Chrome went from forty minutes a day to two hours on the exact evening your phone got strict, nothing stopped. It moved, and the graph is now telling you the size of the thing that moved.

If nothing moved, stop reading. Genuinely. The phone was the whole problem, the fix held, go and have your evening.

People say a phone-only fix lasts about eleven days. That is not a study and we are not going to dress it up as one. It is roughly the gap between the evening you set the limit and the first evening the urge turns up while you are already sitting at the desk, and the desk has never been told anything. Your own number is in that Screen Time report, and yours is the one worth having.

Screen Time on a Mac is not broken. It is pointed at the wrong thing.

On the phone, TikTok is an app. It has an icon, a bundle, a name the system knows. You can point at it and say ninety minutes, and Screen Time understands exactly what you mean.

On the Mac, TikTok is not an app. Neither is Instagram, or Reddit, or X. There is nothing to point at. They are tabs inside the one piece of software you cannot possibly put a limit on, because it is also where your bank is, and your email, and the document you were supposed to be writing when all this started.

Screen Time on a Mac limits applications. The thing eating your evening on a Mac is not an application.

It is worse for the measurement than it is for the blocking. Screen Time counts the time an application spends in front of you. Chrome is one application. Arc is one application. Firefox and Edge are one application each, no matter what is in the tabs. So a Chrome user's weekly report has a single line on it that says Google Chrome, four hours, and that line is completely true and entirely useless.

Safari is the exception, because Apple built the site-by-site reporting into its own browser. Which is a fine reason to move your evening browsing to Safari, and no reason at all to move your work there.

The strongest objection is that Apple already thought of this

Which is fair, because Apple did. There is a switch called Share Across Devices, on the phone at Settings › Screen Time and on the Mac at System Settings › Screen Time. Turn it on in both places, on the same Apple Account, and two real things happen.

Your usage stops being two separate numbers and becomes one combined report, which is the difference between "I was fine on my phone" and knowing what your week actually cost. And your Downtime and your app limits stop being a phone setting and become an account setting, so the schedule you set once applies on both screens.

If you have never turned that on, turn it on before you read the next paragraph. It is free, it takes one tap on each device, and it is the largest single improvement available to somebody in your situation.

Now notice what a synced setting can and cannot carry.

It carries the clock. Downtime from ten at night is Downtime on both screens, and for the specific problem of the hour before bed, that is most of the win.

It cannot carry a limit onto something that is not there. A ninety-minute limit on the TikTok app arrives at a Mac with no TikTok app on it and finds nothing to attach to. The rule is not being ignored. There is no door for it to stand in front of.

And it cannot see into a browser that is not Safari, for the reason above. The full list of what crosses between the two systems and what quietly does not is its own piece: Screen Time on a Mac is not Screen Time on an iPhone. The short version is that the schedule travels and the precision does not.

There is one more Apple lever and it is the only site-level one you get: System Settings › Screen Time › Content & Privacy › Content Restrictions › Web Content. Choose Limit Adult Websites, then Customize, and you get a Restricted list you can type domains into by hand. Add your four.

Then do the part everybody skips. Open the browser you actually use, type one of those domains, and see what happens. Do not assume. Browsers on a Mac do their own networking, and the only honest way to know whether yours is covered is thirty seconds of trying it. If the page loads, you have just learned something more valuable than any article can tell you about your own machine.

The real difference is that on a Mac you are the administrator

Every technique that works on a phone works because the phone will not let you do certain things. You cannot open a terminal. You cannot edit a system file. You cannot log in as somebody else. iOS holds those doors shut on your behalf, and Screen Time gets to stand on top of a floor it did not have to build.

A Mac holds none of them shut, because a Mac is not supposed to. You can quit any process. You can drag any application to the Trash. You can type your password and change a file the system relies on. You can create a second user account, and it arrives with no Screen Time on it at all, because Screen Time follows an Apple Account and the new account does not have yours.

None of that is a hole somebody forgot to fill. It is the reason you bought a computer instead of a larger phone. But it does mean the phone playbook does not transfer, and it explains why the Mac advice you find online is mostly a list of things you can undo in under a minute.

What the second screen actually needs

So the answer for the laptop cannot be a smaller copy of the phone answer. Three things have to be true instead. They are also a fair test to put any Mac blocker through, including ours when it turns up.

It has to work at the site, not at the application.

Because the application is Chrome and you need Chrome. Anything that can only see applications will offer you exactly one move on a Mac, which is to lose your browser for the evening, and you will not take that move twice. There are four honest ways to do site-level blocking on a Mac today, and each of them leaks somewhere: they are compared, with the leak in each one named up front, in how to block a website on a Mac in every browser at once.

It has to survive being quit.

Anything you can close with Command Q at ten to midnight is a reminder, not a rule. This is the same reason a browser extension does so little: it lives inside the thing it is supposed to be guarding, and its off switch is two clicks away in the same window you are already looking at.

Its way out has to cost something and still exist.

This is where most Mac blockers die, and they die in both directions. The strict ones get uninstalled the first Tuesday they cost somebody a meeting. The polite ones get clicked through by Thursday and forgotten by the weekend. What survives on a work machine is the thing that lets you through when you genuinely need through, and charges you for it in something that is not money and cannot be topped up at 11pm.

Which is where we have to admit what we make. Scrappy is a small dog who stands in front of the apps you name. Three rules, no fourth: quiet hours, a daily limit, or a limit on how many times a day you are allowed to open the thing. He starts polite, and the more times you knock the less patient he gets, until the fourth knock, where he is one word. Getting past him costs a treat, and a treat costs roughly two thousand steps of actual walking. Treats are earned. They have never been for sale and they never will be, because the moment you can buy your way past a guard you have bought a decoration.

He does not run on your Mac. That is the honest state of it: the Mac app is not shipped, and a link at the bottom of this page is not going to fix your laptop tonight. When it does ship it will be the same three rules and the same dog and the same treats, walked for rather than bought. What the Mac version will do, and the parts it is going to refuse to do, are already written down in a dog for your Mac.

Until then, the useful order is the one you already started in. The phone is where the habit is strongest, because it is the screen you take to bed and the only one that is in your hand at 11:40. Shut that properly and the worst you are left with is arguing with a laptop, which is a slower, more upright and considerably more self-conscious way to lose an evening. People give up on it much sooner.