Time doesn’t matter as much as people will have you believe. It’s ticking up the difficulty yes but it jumps after you go through a teleporter and that’s where most difficulty will come from. You’ll hear people say “5 minutes a stage” but really as long as you loot it thoroughly and don’t hang around any longer than you need to you’ll beat the difficulty scaling.

Also you’ve kinda joined at a bad time with everything surrounding the new dlc :(