Facebook, Instagram rollout time management tools, here’s how to use them

Do you realise the amount of time you spend on social media apps? Of course, it just seems like “nothing more than 40 min in the entire day”, but when you actually put together the time you spend with the apps, checking them every few minutes, seeing if you have a new follower on **Instagram** , looking up if someone checked in on a new place on **Facebook** , your screen time with these app increases to much more than you realise. And to help you keep tab on that habit, and hopefully helping you cut down a bit on it, Facebook and Instagram are each rolling out a set of tools designed to give users more control of how they spend their time on the apps. “When people use Facebook and Instagram, we want to make sure that they feel good about the time they’ve spent on the platform,” Ameet Ranadive, Instagram’s Product Director of Well-Being writes in a blog post. “A big part of that is making sure that people are in control of their experiences and they can be mindful and intentional about how they’re spending their time, how much time they’re spending, when they engage, how they engage.” The tools include a way to limit notifications, and a dashboard that allows users to keep track of how much time they have spent on the platforms. Facebook is also introducing a daily reminder, whereby users are alerted when they reach the time limit they set for themselves to spend on the app. There will also be an option to deactivate notifications on smartphones. [caption id=“attachment_4874151” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Instagram Your Activity tab.[/caption] In order to access these tools on Instagram, head to the settings page, and tap “Your Activity”. And to see the same on Facebook, go to Settings and “Your Time on Facebook”. On both the apps, at the top, you’ll see a dashboard showing your average time you have spent on the app on that particular device. Tap any bar to see your total time for that day. [caption id=“attachment_4874141” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  ‘Your Time on Facebook’ tab[/caption] Below the dashboard, you can set a daily reminder to give yourself an alert when you’ve reached the amount of time you want to spend on that app for that day. You can change or cancel the reminder at any time. You can also tap on “Notification Settings” to quickly access the new “Mute Push Notifications” setting. This will limit your Instagram or Facebook notifications for a period of time when you need to focus.