Hard Limits Beat Good Intentions
Why I stopped relying on willpower and started building walls instead.
A few months ago I built a Chrome extension that blocks you from opening new tabs once you hit a limit. Not a warning. Not a color change on the badge. An actual block. You try to open a tab, and it doesn’t let you. You have to close something first.
Before that, I tried the gentle version. The tab counter would turn orange at 20 tabs, red at 30. I’d glance at it, think “yeah I should clean those up,” and then open three more tabs without blinking. The information was there. I just didn’t care. Or more accurately, I cared in the abstract but not enough to stop what I was doing in that exact moment.
The hard block changed everything. Not because I became more disciplined. I’m the same person. But now the cost of opening a tab isn’t zero. There’s a moment of friction where I have to decide: is this new tab worth closing one of the ones I already have open? Most of the time the answer is no. My tab count dropped from 60+ to hovering around 15, and I didn’t have to try.
That pattern - walls work, nudges don’t - keeps showing up in my life.
The phone thing
I used to pick up my phone without realizing I was doing it. Waiting in line, sitting on the couch, even mid-conversation sometimes. Screen Time would tell me I was averaging four hours a day, and I’d think “that can’t be right” and then do nothing about it.
I tried the gentle approach first. I turned on the Screen Time limits in iOS, set app timers, enabled grayscale mode. None of it stuck. The limits were too easy to bypass. One tap to “ignore for today” and I was back to scrolling. The information was there. I just didn’t care enough in the moment to act on it.
So I made it harder. I deleted the apps entirely. Not hidden in a folder, not moved to the last screen. Gone. If I want to check Twitter or Instagram, I have to re-download the app, log in, and then use it. That’s enough friction that I almost never bother. The impulse passes before I finish typing my password.
My screen time dropped from four hours to under two. Not because I developed better self-control. Because I made the bad choice harder to make.
Late eating was the same story
My health data showed an even clearer pattern: eating within two hours of bedtime tanks my recovery score. The correlation was so consistent I thought it was a bug at first. It wasn’t.
Same playbook. I tried “being mindful” about eating late. Didn’t work. A plate of leftovers at 10:30 PM is extremely persuasive when you’re tired and not thinking about tomorrow’s recovery score. So I made it a rule. Kitchen closes at 9 PM on weeknights. That’s it. Not a guideline. A wall.
The first week was annoying. After that I stopped noticing. My body adjusted, my recovery scores improved, and I stopped having the nightly debate with myself about whether “just a small snack” counts.
Why willpower loses
The problem with good intentions is that they require you to make the right call every single time. And you’re making that call in the moment, when you’re tired, bored, distracted, or just not thinking about it. You’re asking present-you to act in the interest of future-you, and present-you almost always wins.
A hard limit flips that. Instead of choosing the right thing a hundred times, you choose it once. You set the rule, and then the rule does the work. Every “no” after that is automatic. It’s not discipline. It’s design.
This is something I’ve noticed in product work too, actually. The best product behavior isn’t driven by tooltips and education. It’s driven by defaults and constraints. Make the right thing the easy thing, or better yet, make the wrong thing impossible. Users don’t read warnings. They don’t even read modals. But they’ll absolutely change their behavior when something just doesn’t let them proceed.
Turns out I’m the same kind of user in my own life.
Where it doesn’t work
I want to be honest about this: it’s not a universal fix. Hard limits work best when the thing you’re limiting is impulsive and habitual. Tabs, snacking, caffeine - these are autopilot behaviors. You do them without thinking, so the fix has to work without thinking too.
But some things aren’t autopilot. Creative work, relationships, exercise - you can’t just wall your way into being better at those. A rule that says “write for 30 minutes every morning” doesn’t produce good writing. It produces someone sitting at a desk for 30 minutes. The limit helps you show up, but what happens after you show up is a different problem.
So I’ve learned to split things into two categories. For the mindless stuff - the habits, the impulses, the things I do on autopilot - hard limits. Walls. Remove the decision. For the things that actually matter and require real engagement, no limits. Just show up and see what happens.
The thing I keep coming back to
I used to think I had a discipline problem. I’d read about habits and systems and think, “If I could just be more consistent, all of this would be easier.” But I don’t think that’s it anymore. I think I was just asking myself to make too many decisions. Every decision has a cost, even the small ones, and by the end of the day I’d burned through whatever decision-making budget I had on things that shouldn’t have required a decision at all.
The tabs, the coffee, the late-night eating - none of these needed my judgment. They just needed a wall. And once the wall was there, I had more energy left for the things that actually deserve my attention.
I’m not going to sell this as a life philosophy. It’s just something I noticed, tested, and kept because it worked. Build the wall, stop deciding, move on to the stuff that matters.