YouTube's new tools to help you keep tabs on how much you watch.
What's going on. I'm rich Demiro. This is Rich on tech.
YouTube is introducing some new ways to help you stay on a good digital diet. This is part of a bigger trend we're seeing around digital wellness from big companies including Google, Facebook, Apple, and more. Now YouTube's new tools are in the mobile app. To get to them, just open the app and then tap your profile picture. Usually it's in the upper right hand corner. Then look for the new section labeled time watched.
Once you open this up, you can immediately see your viewing stats. You can see how much time you spent watching today, yesterday, the past week, or your daily average.
This can be a handyway for parents to check in on their kids to see how much YouTube they're really watching on a daily basis, But as a regular person, you can also just see for yourself.
Am I watching too much YouTube?
That I watch more or less than I thought over the past couple of weeks. Down below this information are some tools to help you manage your YouTube time, including an option to remind you to take a break. You can set this frequency as you like, whether it's every fifteen minutes every hour, or really whatever you want. Once you hit this time limit, you're gonna get a friendly screen telling you to take a break. And yes, you might be thinking yourself, Hey, rich this was already in my app before.
Yes, you're right.
This is a relatively new feature, but it has been in the app for a little bit of time. But now it's all under this new section labeled time watched. Underneath the option to remind you to take a break is a toggle to turn auto play off. AutoPlay is one of the ways that YouTube gets us to watch and watch and watch, So if you have this problem where you keep watching you're spending too much mindless time on the site, it's probably a good idea to turn
this off. And if you have kids that are watching YouTube, like I talked about in a couple of episodes ago, it's a good idea to turn off auto play because you never know if that next video is going to be appropriate for them. After this, the next two toggles are very useful. The first is called Scheduled Digest. This bundles all of your new subscription, video alerts and other YouTube notifications to one giant notification at a specific time now I definitely see the pros and cons of this one.
As a creator, you don't really want people turning this on because they're not going to be immediately notified when your next video drops. Plus, if your video notification is bundled in with a bunch of other people's video notifications, there's a.
Good chance that your video won't be watched.
Now, on the flip side, you do get to pick the delivery time for your digest notification, so that means you can choose a time when you know you're sitting around or you know you're gonna have some free time each day to catch up on your video subscription. So for me personally, I get these little notifications from some of the creators. I've turned on that bell for throughout the day and I'm at work, I'm busy, and guess what,
I just swipe them away. Now, if I knew it, let's say three PM, when I was sitting in front of my TV, I was able to watch some of these things and had some time, then perhaps I would be more app to watching these videos. So it's definitely a pro and con to that one. You can turn it on if you find it useful. The final setting is sort of a do not disturb, but just for YouTube. You can silence notification during a timeframe that you specify.
So if you don't want YouTube.
Nagging you while you're at work, you can set those as your silent hours. Now, keep in mind this feature might overlap with your standard do not disturb setting, so keep that in mind when you're setting it up.
But realistically it doesn't matter.
It's just for the app. You can set it as you like. So why the big emphasis on digital wellness right now? Well, it just seems like we're spending a lot of time on our phones and if we let every single app notify us every single time they want our attention, we'll think about it. We won't have any time in our days for anything else. And already we notice this happening. Controls like this are letting us take
back the digital rains. And on that note, I've been testing Google's new digital well Being feature in Android nine PI, and it's really interesting because there's a lot of aspects of this that I like. Because these phones are new, all these notifications are new, we're still figuring out how to deal with them in our everyday lives. So, for instance, the do not Disturb feature in Pie literally takes away any notifications on my screen while I'm sleeping.
Or if I'm out at night and I have it turned on.
And the neat thing about these notifications is when they're out of sight, they're out of mind. You're not even thinking to check them if you don't see them on your screen personally. I've also set thirty minute timers on all of my social media apps, so I get thirty minutes to use Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter each day, and you can set that number to whatever you want. I
just pick thirty. It was kind of arbitrary just to see what it was, and I've been hitting my limit mostly in the early evening, maybe five six o'clock, and it's kind of liberating because that's the time I spend out my kids. And once that happens, the app, like my Twitter icon, is literally grade out and I cannot use it. I can't open it, I can't see any notifications from it until the next day. And sure I can probably override the time out somehow by going into
the settings, but so far I haven't. I haven't even felt the need to. You just sort of forget about checking the app again. Until the morning when it's not great out anymore, and you can use it again. So
I think that this is actually serving its purpose. The other side effect is that I don't want to waste time in these apps because I know that every minute spent inside of them is precious and I might need that time later on in the day to share something or to comment on something, or do whatever inside Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Now for me, this is a little bit complicated because part of my job relies on social media, so I'm still figuring out.
That and how to navigate that properly.
But the bottom line is, Look, we're all spending wasted time inside these apps, so I'm sure we can all trim it just a little bit. Apple's also going to introduce a similar feature in the next version of their operating system iOS twelve.
Which is going to launch in a few weeks.
And although all these limits seem counterintuitive to the businesses that these tech companies have built, which are basically based on grabbing our attention, in the end, they're seeing this self regulation as a good first step.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you want links to more information on these YouTube controls or digital wellbeing in general.
Go to my website.
It's Rich on tech dot TV, or check the show notes.
I'm Rich Damiro. I'll talk to you real soon.