YouTube Starts Telling You How Much Time You’re Wasting on YouTube

By Janko Rottgers

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – YouTube began rolling out its so-called digital wellbeing tools Monday morning, which include a dashboard that tells users how much time they’ve spent on the service watching videos. The Google-owned video service also recently launched a new feature that allows users to set reminders, alerting them when it’s time to take a break from binging.

painted these new features as part of a move to provide “new tools that help people better understand their tech usage, focus on what matters most and disconnect when needed” in a blog post published Monday morning. The post also detailed how users can minimize interruptions by managing the frequency of alerts the YouTube app is serving up.

The new watch time dashboard informs users how much time they’ve spent watching YouTube today, yesterday and over the past 7 days. However, there’s a bit of a caveat: Time spent watching YouTube TV and YouTube Music won’t be included in the dashboard.

Google first put the spotlight on digital wellbeing at its Google I/O developer conference in May.  At the time, Google also announced that it was going to include a dashboard for overall smart phone usage monitoring in the next version of Android, which is expected to launch for end users in October.

“Helping people with their digital well-being is more important to us than ever,” said Google vice president of product management Sameer Samat at the time.