Every time you’re in a queue, travelling on public transport or just walking down the street, you may get this uncontrollable urge to look at your phone and watch a funny video or check out what your friends are up to on social media.

It’s become second nature for so many people, they don’t even think about how much time they’re spending on these apps.

Well, now they can easily find out.

In order to encourage users to have “time well spent” online, Facebook and Instagram are slowly rolling out new features in the coming weeks that will help users monitor their usage.

One of the tools will notify users once they’ve reached a pre-set amount of time.

Users can also view data that shows how much time they use the app daily and weekly.

Google is also getting in on the action.

As part of the digital wellbeing initiative announced in May, Google has introduced a feature that allows you to check how much time you’ve spent watching videos on YouTube.

As YouTube Product Management Director Brian Marquardt wrote in a blog post: “Once you know how much time you’re spending in the app, you may want to set a limit.”

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there were 15 million Aussie facebook users at the start of 2018.

More than three in four Singaporeans are using social media, and there are 21.9 million social media users in Malaysia, according to the 2017 Internet Users Survey by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.

Are you ready to find out how much time you’ve been spending watching goat yoga videos? Here’s how:

Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and Instagram
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Do note that the Activity Dashboard feature is progressively being introduced.

While on the Facebook app, access “Settings & Privacy” under the menu tab. Click on “Your Time on Facebook” to access a dashboard that shows you your daily time spent on the app as well as your weekly average.

The setup is similar for Instagram. Go to “Settings” and look for the new option called “Your Activity”, which will show you a dashboard with your usage information similar to the ones available on Facebook.

You can also set a “Daily Reminder” on both apps to notify you once you’ve used the app for a set amount of time: 15 minutes, one hour, two hours, four hours and eight hours.

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YouTube

YouTube
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Tap on your Account tab once you’ve signed in to the app, then tap on “Time Watched”.

This will show you how much time you’ve spent watching videos today, yesterday and over the past seven days.

YouTube also has another handy feature that will remind you to take a break.

Simply tap on “Settings”, go to “General” then “Remind me to take a break”.

Select the reminder frequency and the video will pause at the set time until you dismiss the notification and resume playing, or change the reminder frequency.

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