Parental Controls have been around since Windows 7, evolved quite a bit in Windows 8, and improved even more in Windows 10. With it, you can do all kinds of stuff like restrict program access, record activity logs, and even limit the times when accounts can log on.
But Parental Controls requires the target account to be a child account. Furthermore, in Windows 10, you'll need a Microsoft account. What if you just want to use local accounts instead? No problem!
All you have to do is launch the Command Prompt as Admin, which you can do by using the Windows + X keyboard shortcut to open the Power User Menu, then selecting the Command Prompt (Admin) option.
Now that you have an elevated Command Prompt open, type in the following command:
net user <username> /time:<limits>
Replace the username tags with the name of the user account you want to set a time limit on. To see a list of all accounts on your system, just type net user with no other parameters.
Also, replace the limits tags with the days and times for those days. Days of the week are represented as Su,M,T,W,Th,F,Sa and times are given in 24-hour format. So if you want to limit on Monday from 8AM to 6PM:
/time:M,08:00-18:00
You can cover a range of days like this:
/time:M-F,08:00-18:00
You can have multiple limits by separating with a semicolon:
/time:M-F,08:00-18:00;Sa-Su,09:00-22:00
If you want to remove all limits on an account:
/time:all
Putting it all together, I could set a limit on an account like so:
net user JohnSmith /time:M-F,08:00-18:00;Sa-Su,09:00-22:00
Did you find this useful? Is there another way to do this? Let us know what you think in the comments below!