How to Block Your PC at Night (and Go to Bed Sooner)

Have you ever had the problem of staying up late because of playing video games or browsing the Internet with your computer? You can use FocusMe to handle that.

There are multiple ways to achieve this, but for simplicity’s sake, Here’s the easiest method:

Go to the Breaks tab by clicking on it. You should see something like this:

Enabled/Disabled – Used to turn the breaks feature of FocusMe on or off.

Automatic Breaks – For this tutorial you can leave this turned off:

Edit Breaks Protection can be setup as follows:

Disabled – No password protection is set

Random password – You will be asked to input a system generated password whenever you attempt to change the settings. The password length can be set.

Custom password – Set your own password that will be asked whenever the settings are to be changed.

Note: The password protection is only applicable to the break settings. It does not apply to the breaks themselves.

Auto Break Protection and Scheduled Protection are used to protect your auto and scheduled breaks from being interrupted. You can set them as follows:

You can keep both disabled for this tutorial.

Breaks can be scheduled to be either on a daily or weekly setup.

Daily – Setup a break schedule that is recurring each day.

Weekly – Setup a more detailed schedule that runs on a weekly basis.

Let’s say, for example, you wanted to set a break schedule that blocks your computer at the times when you need to be asleep (8pm – 6am). You can set the schedule like so:

Take note of the following:

  • Breaks is Enabled (so the schedule would work)
  • Scheduled Protection is set to Random Password (character length up to you)
  • A custom password in the Edit Breaks Protection is set
  • The scheduled breaks is set to Daily, with two time slots:
  • 12am (00:00) – 6am (06:00)
  • 8pm (20:00) – 12am (24:00)
  • The times used are in military format.

This means your computer will be blocked from 8pm to 6am every day. While it is on break, you will see a screen like below. Since the Scheduled protection is set to Random Password, you will be asked to enter the random password if you want to cancel out of the break.

A stricter break schedule can be achieved by setting the Scheduled Protection to Forced.

WARNING: If set to Forced, you won’t be able to stop the break. Take extra care when choosing this option.

You can change the schedule to suit your needs or even go with a Weekly schedule for a more detailed plan.

 

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