Setting Daily Website Time Limits That Actually Hold

How to set per-site daily minute budgets in Limiter, pick numbers you can keep, and manage your rules from the dashboard.

Updated July 21, 2026 3 min readbeginner

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Setting a limit in Limiter takes four steps and about a minute. Setting a limit that survives the afternoon takes one extra decision: choosing a number that is honest rather than aspirational. A budget you can keep beats a total ban you abandon on day three — and it also beats a budget so tight you delete the rule by Thursday.

Before you begin

Limiter installed — see the Limiter setup guide

Adding and managing limits

Open the dashboard

Press Alt + Shift + L from any tab. Instant access matters more than it sounds: adding a site the moment you notice it is a problem is the difference between a rule you set and a rule you meant to set.

Add the domain

Enter the site once — URL normalisation means the whole domain is covered, every subpath and shared-link variant included, so there is nothing else to configure.

Set its daily minutes

Each site gets its own independent budget, and you can track unlimited domains. Different sites deserve different numbers: the news site that earns ten minutes is not the video site that needs forty-five.

Adjust as you learn

Find any rule later with the dashboard's real-time search — type a few characters instead of scrolling a list — and edit its minutes in place.

Choosing numbers that hold

Start from what you actually spend, not what you wish you spent. If a feed currently takes an hour a day, a five-minute budget is a plan to disable the extension; forty-five minutes is a limit you will keep — and keeping it is what matters, because the countdown overlay starts changing behaviour before the block screen ever fires. Sessions end early once elapsed time is visible.

Then trim gradually. A budget that shrinks by five or ten minutes each week arrives at the same destination as the aggressive cut, with none of the abandonment risk. People rebuilding focus habits consistently do better ratcheting down from generous than recovering from strict.

Two patterns worth stealing: give every candidate site a generous ceiling first week just to measure (the overlay doubles as a tracker), and set deliberately asymmetric budgets — tight on the sites that produce nothing, loose on the ones that are marginal.

When the budget runs out

At zero, navigation to the site redirects to the block screen for the rest of the day; the allowance resets tomorrow morning, with no weekly carry-over to game. The overlay drains visibly on the way there, so the stop is never a surprise — you can wrap up the genuinely useful thing before the door closes. The mechanics of what counts as "time on the site" are covered in how time tracking works.

Add sites one or two at a time. A dashboard with your three real problems on it changes your day; a dashboard with twenty speculative rules becomes noise you stop respecting.

Next steps

Limiter

Give each distracting site a daily time budget and get a countdown overlay before it quietly eats your afternoon.

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