Facebook today announced new tools to help people manage their time on Facebook and Instagram: an activity dashboard, a daily reminder and a new way to limit notifications.
Similar to Apple’s Screen Time, the tools are intended to help users monitor and control their usage of both the main Facebook app and Instagram.
Facebook said today,
“We developed these tools based on collaboration and inspiration from leading mental health experts and organizations, academics, our own extensive research and feedback from our community. We want the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram to be intentional, positive and inspiring.
Our hope is that these tools give people more control over the time they spend on our platforms and also foster conversations between parents and teens about the online habits that are right for them.”
Each app is getting a new usage page that aims to make you more self-aware of how much time you’re spending on them. The main page shows how much time you’ve spent on Facebook/Instagram over the last week, as well as your daily average for the past seven days.
“We have a whole team of experts who are working on wellbeing and thinking about how do we learn more, how do we understand more about the relationship between social media and wellbeing,” said David Ginsberg, Facebook’s Director of Research, at Tuesday’s press briefing.
To access the tools, go to the settings page on either app. On Instagram tap “Your Activity,” and on Facebook, tap “Your Time on Facebook.” At the top, you’ll see a dashboard showing your average time for that app on that device.
Tap any bar to see your total time for that day. 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 Facebook or Instagram notifications for a period of time when you need to focus.
