The vocabulary around screen time and blocking is vague enough that two products can claim the same feature and mean completely different things. These are the terms that actually decide whether a blocker holds, defined plainly.
A block that cannot be removed while it is active, as opposed to a warning you can click through.
A soft block shows a message, a countdown, or a confirmation dialog, and then lets you continue. It works when you are already inclined to stop and fails at the exact moment it matters. A hard block refuses. There is no continue button, no override, and no confirmation that quietly grants access.
The distinction is the whole reason strict blockers exist. Most people who go looking for a new blocker are not looking for more block types. They are looking for one that does not negotiate.
The mechanism that determines how long a block holds and what, if anything, releases it early.
Building a block list is easy. Holding it is hard. The lock type is what decides whether a blocker changes your behaviour or just documents your intentions.
Common lock types are duration locks, which hold for a fixed period; scheduled locks, which hold during defined hours or days; and friction locks, which require a deliberate, tedious step to release. Ascension supports permanent blocks, time limits, entry delays and schedules, each of which can be locked.
More: Features
Enforcement that survives removal of the application.
Without uninstall protection, every blocker reduces to a two-minute detour through the uninstall dialog. The block list, the lock types and the schedules are all decoration if the enforcement layer disappears the moment you remove the program.
With it, uninstalling the app does not lift an active locked block. This is the single most important feature in a strict blocker, and the one most worth checking before you pay for anything.
A forced waiting period before a site opens, rather than a refusal to open it.
An entry delay does not forbid access. It removes the impulse window. Most compulsive visits are not decisions; they are reflexes that complete in under a second. Inserting fifteen or thirty seconds of nothing between the reflex and the reward is enough to break a surprising number of them.
This is the right tool for sites you genuinely need but habitually over-use, where a permanent block would cost you something real.
Enforcement below the browser, applying to every browser and application on the machine at once.
A system-level blocker covers the whole machine. Installing a second browser is not a bypass, closing the app is not a bypass, and desktop applications are in scope alongside websites.
Ascension enforces at system level across Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi simultaneously, and can block installed applications as well as web content.
A blocker installed as an add-on inside a single browser.
Extension blockers are convenient, often free, and genuinely useful as a first step. StayFocusd and LeechBlock NG are the best known.
Their limit is structural rather than a matter of quality: an extension protects one browser. Opening a different browser bypasses it entirely, and the extension itself can be disabled from the extensions page in a few clicks, which usually resets every rule you configured.
Software that reports your activity to another person rather than preventing the activity.
Accountability tools deter through social consequence. They take screenshots or logs, scan them, and send anything flagged to a person you nominate. Covenant Eyes is the best known example.
Two things follow from the design. It does not stop access in the moment, because a report arriving tomorrow is not a barrier tonight. And it captures everything on screen, including banking, work and private messages, which is a real privacy cost that a blocker does not ask you to pay.
How much effort is required to defeat a blocker.
Bypass resistance is the practical measure of a blocker's value, and the metric most product pages avoid. Feature counts are easy to grow; resistance is not.
A useful way to test it: write down every route out that you can think of, then try each one. Uninstalling, ending the process, changing the system clock, opening a second browser, booting into safe mode, editing settings mid-session. A blocker's real strength is whatever survives that list.
A weighted measure of screen time that accounts for what the time was spent on, not only how long it lasted.
A raw screen time total cannot distinguish eight hours of writing code from eight hours of streaming. Both report the same number, which makes the number close to useless as feedback.
Ascension's implementation is Impact Points: every app and website scores from 0 to 1000 points per hour based on how stimulating it is. Lower is better. Adult content, gambling and short-form video score high; effortful, low-stimulation work scores low.
More: Impact Points
Data is stored and processed on your device rather than uploaded to a server.
For a tool that observes everything you do on a computer, where the data lives is not a footnote. Local-first means your activity history is on your machine, not in someone's database, and not exposed by someone else's breach.
Ascension tracks screen time locally. No screenshots are taken, no browsing history is uploaded, and no account is required for tracking. Account data exists only for licensing and billing.
More: Privacy
Ascension is a local-first screen time tracker and hard-to-bypass blocker for Windows. Start a free 15-day trial.