Android 9 Pie has brought along its fair share of digital wellbeing tools, but Google has today made it simpler for users to track their YouTube usage, thanks to tools available within the app.
YouTube has now added a new ‘Time Watched’ section in user’s account page (accessible from the top right corner), which will display you the amount of time spent watching videos each day. It not just shows stats in hours and minutes for the current day, but also the previous day and the whole week.
These numbers are calculated based on your watch history, excluding YouTube Music and YouTube TV. It means that videos you watch in incognito or other platforms will not count towards the total time, which means the numbers will be skewed for privacy enthusiasts.
Our goal is to provide a better understanding of time spent on YouTube, so you can make informed decisions about how you want YouTube to best fit into your life.
As for how to curb your addiction, the company has already released two tools that allow you to take a break and not be notified of new video uploads at all times.
These tools were previously available in the settings menu, but have now been moved to the ‘Time Watched’ option, giving users reminders to take breaks after a certain period or receive notifications in the form of a digest at a fixed time during the day.
I think this will only make the platform a little less distracting for the whole day but you may spend a lot of time picking and watching videos from your digest.
Additionally, YouTube has made an important change to how notifications are delivered at night. It will now send notifications without any sound or vibration between 10:00 pm and 8:00 am, but you can customize the time frame to suit your schedule. This will be acting as a ‘do not disturb’ setting for YouTube, which is a much welcome addition.
So, are you ready to let YouTube inform you of your video watching habits? And how you can curb the addiction? Let us know in the comments below.
