Learn how to reduce the amount of time you spend on Instagram by setting the app to send you reminders to take a break, or inform you of your daily usage limit.
As we all know, social media sites and apps can be huge time sucks. You jump on to wish someone a happy birthday, and before you know it, you’ve wasted an hour of your workday browsing your feed.
You can use tools like Screen Time to limit the time you spend on specific apps. But Instagram brings its own built-in tool to the app. This tool doesn’t technically limit the time you spend on Instagram but reminds you that you’ve been using it long enough.
Here, we’ll show you how to receive a daily reminder to limit your time on Instagram. But first, we’ll fill you in on how to see the amount of time you’re actually spending with the app each day.
View how much time you spend on Instagram
Whenever you use the Instagram app on your iPhone, the time you spend with the app is logged. To view your activity, open the app and follow these steps:
- Go to your profile screen by tapping its icon from the bottom right.
- Tap the menu icon from the top right.
- Select Your activity.
- Scroll down and tap Time spent. On the activity screen, you’ll see a nice column chart that displays your average time on Instagram each day. You’ll see an overall average at the top and can tap and hold a particular day to see the amount of time for that day.
Get reminders to take regular breaks
On the Time Spent screen, you have a few handy options to manage your time.
Tap Break reminder, and you can choose to get reminders by Instagram every 10, 20, or 30 minutes to go out of the app and take a break. Among other things, taking breaks periodically will be easy for your eyes.
Set a daily limit for Instagram usage
The app can also help you limit the time you spend here by sending you a reminder to close the app.
To do that, right on the Instagram Time spent screen, you’ll see an option titled Daily limit. Tap it, choose the daily time limit to 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour, or 2 hours, and hit Turn on.
When you’re actively using Instagram, your notification will alert you at the time you specified. You can then tap OK or Edit Reminder.
Obviously, if you tap OK to acknowledge that you’ve reached your daily limit, you should close the app and move on to another activity. Just like with Screen Time limits, this reminder is only helpful if you adhere to it. But if you don’t feel that you’ve allowed yourself enough time, tap Edit Reminder and choose a new alert time.
What do you think about the Instagram daily reminder? Is this a feature you’ll try, or do you already make sure you don’t spend too much time with the app? Let us know!
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