‘Your Time on Facebook’ Helps You Spend Less Time in the App
If your new year’s resolution is to stay off Facebook, check out the “Your Time on Facebook” feature to remind you to put down your phone more often.
Facebook is very time-consuming; that’s a fact. If you want to at least try to limit time spent Facebook usage there might be hope. The social network has introduced a feature in its mobile app that helps you decrease the time spent on it. Here’s how to take advantage of it and get some of your life back.
Your Time on Facebook
In all fairness, the only way to completely get over Facebook is by deactivating your account. Or, better yet, completely delete your Facebook account and never look back.
But if you want to slowly ween yourself off the endless hours of scrolling through various memes and outrage, the new tool can help quell your addiction. The new feature allows you to see how much time you’re spending (wasting) on the app. It also lets you set limits. And get notifications when you go over said limits.
Note that the screenshots shown below are from an Android phone. However, the feature works virtually the same on the iPhone app.
Stats and Tools
To find it, just tap the menu button in the Facebook app at the top right of the screen. Then, scroll down to Your Time on Facebook. There you’ll see your current stats for the week.
Tapping each day will give you the exact time spent on the app.
This screen also includes shortcuts to other preferences that can help you get the most from your time on Facebook. You can edit what shows up in your news feed and manage friend requests. You can also edit notifications. Presumably, fewer notifications would translate to less time checking the app.
What does really help, though, is the Set daily time reminder option. Tap this and set the amount of time you want to spend on Facebook each day. If you set it for one hour, for example, after you’ve spent that amount of time using the app, you’ll get a notification.
Used together with something like Android’s Digital Wellbeing Tools, this has the potential to help you put your smartphone down a little more. In the end, though, it’s all down to your own willpower.
