Screen Time and Parental Controls In macOS Catalina

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode let's take a look at the new Screen Time feature in macOS Catalina.

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The new Screen Time feature does two things. The first thing it does is it does a pretty poor job of tracking your usage from app to app. The second thing it does is much more useful. It allows you to restrict the amount of time you spend using apps and going to websites on your Mac. You could use this either for self discipline or for setting up parental controls.

So the way you get to Screen Time is you go to System Preferences. Under System Preferences you'll find Screen Time there is you're running macOS Catalina. Now the column on your left allows you to select a category of information and on the right you see the data. So under App Usage you'll see how much you've used apps and different categories of apps over the last day and then you can change the day. So I can go back and look at yesterday for instance and the day before. I can always click Today to jump back to today. 

Here's a list of the apps and how much time I've spent using them sorted by time. I can also switch to Categories and that will group things together. So, for instance, social networking includes the Messages app which is why there's so much right there. I can click on any of these to get the information here in the graph. So I can do that by app or by category. That's how you see how much time you spend using different apps. 

Now in my test the data isn't that good. For instance an app that's running, but you're not using it, is still going to be counted. So if you've got Messages up and it's behind, say, Safari it's going to count Safari and Messages both as being used during that time. Even if you Hide the app I find that it's still counting it. For instance the Notes app has been hidden and it's still counting up the minutes. I'm clearly not using it as it's not even visible on the screen. On the iPhone this is a lot more useful because you really only have one app visible on the screen at a time. But here on the Mac it gets really confusing about how much time you're actually spending on something. Like I really haven't spent that much time using Messages at all. As a matter of fact I haven't sent or read a single message during this time and yet it still counts it as a lot of time spent in that app. 

Now Notifications is interesting because it's not really about you. It's about the apps. It's about how much they're bugging you for things. So, for instance, if I go to yesterday I can see that I had a couple from a FaceTime. I can go back and see there's one from Reminders. Now there's not much going on on this demo account here but you can imagine if you're running an app that's bugging you with notifications all day long you'll start to see a pattern here and be able to modify Notifications so that app doesn't throw so much information at you all the time.

Now if app usage is a little confusing Pickups is even worse because there's really no consistency to what a pickup is. Pickup on the iPhone makes a lot of sense. The iPad a little less so. But on the Mac it doesn't make any sense at all. Sometimes it seems to record a pickup if you launch an app and sometimes it doesn't. So I'm really not sure what it's counting here. Looking online it doesn't seem like anybody is really sure about what it's counting.

Okay, so I don't know if this Screen Time information here is that useful but the following set of Settings is very useful especially if you plan to use them as parental controls. So first you can set downtime. So you can turn this on and now you can set time where you shouldn't be using the Mac at all. So you can setup a specific time of the day or you can do Custom which will give you different times for different days of the week. During downtime you won't be able to use any apps except those that you put in the Always Allowed list here. So this basically allows you to say there's a whole bunch of stuff that I don't want to be allowed to use after a certain time of the day and only maybe some essentials can be used during that time. Of you can just turn everything off so you really can't use your Mac at the end of the day. Perhaps helping you a little bit with self discipline or if you're using this as parental controls you can really have these hours that the machine is completely cutoff.

Now App Limits basically allow you to add a single app or category of apps to the list and then give them limits. So, for instance, under Productivity I can go and say, alright let's only allow the Calculator app and let's say for five minutes a day. Then it goes to the list. You can see here I got a little reminder saying almost time up for Calculator. Five minutes left. So you can add all sorts of other apps. Let's add an app for a very short period of time. Let's say I can only use Calendar and do that for just one minute a day. So this is useful for two things. One is for self discipline. Being able to go and say I want to limit my time on these apps and you're going to get these alerts. But you can bypass them. But if you're going to use them for parental controls then you can set them as hard limits.

So let's see what happens now when I get to that one minute mark with the Calendar app. There we go. So I hit the time limit. I can hit OK or Ignore Limit. When I click that I get options. I can say just give me One More Minute on this app. So in other words maybe I'm just about to save something or finishing something off. I could say go to 15 minutes. I could say forget the time limit, I don't want this time limit for today. You know this is all about self discipline if you're not going to set this up as a parental control. But if I click OK then the app goes away. Now if I try to run it again you can see it's grayed out here in the Dock which is interesting to see. If I launch it again you can see that it comes up with that same result here. I can hit OK or I can do Ignore limit and give myself one more minute.

Now, how about setting this up as Parental Controls. Well if you go to Options this is where you get that ability. You can set a Screen Time passcode. Now this is normally done on a standard account. Not an Admin account. An Admin account you can override pretty much anything. So on a standard account this would be a hard time limit on everything. You would go and set a passcode that you could use to get around it on the standard account. But the minor in your family wouldn't know so they would be stopped from being able to use that app or the computer at all after the limit has been set. Now they do still get One More Minute so they have that ability. But they don't get the fifteen minute reminder or ignore for the rest of the day. 

Also here on this Option screen you get the Share Across Devices option there. Then all of your stats would be recorded for your iPhone, your iPad, and your other Macs and so forth. Also if you're setting this up as parental controls you get Content & Privacy here. So you can setup restrictions on content. So if you turn this on here you can see that you can limit Adult Websites so from some sort of list that Apple's pulling from. Only from a list of allowed websites so you can setup this list and add as you want. There's also a few other parental control settings here as well.

You can go into Stores and you can set rating limits for different things like movies and music. You can go into Apps and disallow certain types of apps or certain uses for apps like the ability to use the camera on the Mac and a few other settings here as well that you would want to restrict if this was the account of a child. 

One other thing I want to show you. Under App Usage you also, in addition to getting like the general browser category of using Safari, you're also going to get websites. So you'll see your usage of websites, the top ones anyway. Under Limits you can add sites. So go to the Plus button here and I can go and look at websites and it will list websites that it noticed I'm using. But I can also add my own. So at the bottom of this list here I can add a website and type in one that I hadn't been to yet. This allows you to restrict access to specific websites whether again it's for self discipline or for setting up parental controls.

So the way you would setup parental controls in Catalina is first you have to setup a separate account and make it a standard account. This is how you would have done it before. Of course the child wouldn't have your password and wouldn't be able to get into your Admin account. They would only have their own password and be able to get into their standard account. Then you log into their standard account. Go to Screen Time and setup a passcode for Screen Time. Once you've done that you can setup all the different restrictions, whether it's for the entire computer, different apps, websites, and all of those other miscellaneous privacy settings that I showed you. Then they wouldn't be able to change those settings or get more than just that one extra minute without knowing that passcode.

So if you use parental controls before with Mojave or earlier you should have all the control you had before you just have to do it in a slightly different way. It's actually a little more straight forward now.