One of the things that people do most while online is watching YouTube videos, whether for research or for entertainment purposes. But we have to admit that it’s not always a very healthy habit. Google announced during their I/O developers conference that they will be launching tools to help people’s Digital Wellbeing across their various products. This time, it’s YouTube’s turn to give you those tools that you may need to curb your “addiction” while not going cold turkey.
If you’ve never kept track of how much time you actually spend on YouTube, prepare to be shocked (well if you do spend a lot of time there). In your account menu, you will now be able to see how long you’ve watched videos there. It will show you the stats for today, the day before, and the past seven weeks. It will also give you a daily average of your viewing time so you know if you’re wasting too much time or if you’re just on an average viewing time.
Now that you have a better understanding of how much you use YouTube, you can now set up a reminder for you to take a break. Just under the Time Watched section, you can turn on the “remind me to take a break” toggle and then pick the right amount of time that you should spend on YouTube. When that time expires, a reminder will pop up on your screen to stop watching and take a break. It won’t automatically stop you from using the app, but it will remind you to do so.
Notifications can sometimes be a huge distraction for you. So with YouTube, you can just keep everything to one notification a day. All of them will be bundled into one and you can choose a specific time every day when you want to receive this sort of news digest of the channels that you follow or the people who comment on your videos, etc. You will also now receive notifications between 10AM to 8PM without any sound or vibration. You can always enable it or set what time you should and shouldn’t have them in the settings.
These tools are now rolling out to YouTube users. Google is in this interesting space where they are giving people tools to use their products less but they’re also gaining goodwill in looking out for their users’ digital well-being.
SOURCE: YouTube
