While the Wind Down feature in the Digital Wellbeing section of your phone is pretty helpful and healthy, there are times when you have to suddenly break your almost-sleep. Previously, the only way you could do was to disable Wind Down and then enable it later on when you’re really ready to sleep. But more often than not, we would forget to do the latter or you’ll just not turn it on again. Now it looks like Google will soon be introducing a feature that would let you pause the feature when needed.
If you’ve never used Wind Down before, it limits distractions for you so you can get ready for bed. It turns your display to grayscale and mutes all your notifications. It’s actually a digital nudge for you to go to stop using your phone and go to bed. However it can be quite rigid and for the times when you suddenly need to do something, like answer an email or list down things to do for the next day, it can be a nuisance.
Android Police spotted on the beta version that you will now get a “pause for 30 minutes” button so you can put on hold all the Wind Down features. This will give you more time to finish whatever it is you need to do before you start winding down again. After 30 minutes, it will activate again and turn grayscale and mute notifications and all that. If you finish your task before the 30 minutes are up, you can switch Wind Down back on through the notification.
While it’s probably useful for those who have to work a bit from home, it can also be a way for those making an excuse to stay up later than usual. Digital Wellbeing is a useful tool to help you curb your digital habits but it still, of course, depends on how you use it or not use it.
This feature is rolling out for those in the beta program for Digital Wellbeing but it’s on a server-side switch so if you don’t see it yet, you’ll have to wait. You can also grab it directly from APK Mirror.
