Facebook and Instagram now have a suite of time-management tools to help you keep tabs on how long you spend uploading, liking and commenting every day.
Last month, eagle-eyed Facebook users discovered a reference to an option called 'Your Time on Facebook' in the social network's official Android app. The feature has now rolled out in the form of a dashboard that reveals how long you spend using the app each day, and lets you set limits and mute notifications for certain periods.
Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) has a similar set of tools called 'Your activity', which should help you avoid whiling away hours admiring photos of elegantly plated avocados on toast.
Time well spent
To access the new tools in the Facebook app, tap the menu icon (three horizontal lines) and scroll down to 'Your Time on Facebook'. In the Instagram app, you can find the 'Your activity' dashboard in your account settings.
Once there, you can see how long you've spent on the app over the last week, and how much time you spend using it each day on average. You can set a custom daily time allowance, and suspend push notifications so you aren't distracted throughout the rest of your day.
The new time-management tools are rolling out to 99% of users globally over the next couple of weeks. The remaining 1% will be kept in the dark about their social media usage so Facebook can monitor whether the new dashboards actually cause users to cut back.
