If you have an inkling that you’re spending a little more time than you should scrolling through your Instagram feed, then a new feature for the app will let you know for sure.
The so-called “activity dashboard” was spotted earlier this year buried in code that powers the Facebook-owned Instagram app, and the feature is now starting to land for users around the world.
It shows you how much time you’ve spent on the popular photo-sharing app during the preceding seven days. And if the size of the bars on the usage chart sends a shiver down your spine, you can take action to help you control how you use the app.
This includes setting up a notification that will appear on your device once you hit a time limit for the number of minutes or hours spent on the app each day. You can set the limit for anywhere between 5 minutes, and 23 hours and 55 minutes, an upper limit which, yes, is a bit daft when you think about it. Still, it may be the ideal setting for the most dedicated ‘grammers who’re in complete and utter denial about their addiction to the app.
The dashboard also offers a quick way for you to mute all of those distracting push notifications — or you can select which specific ones you want to silence — so that you’re not tempted to dive into Instagram every time new content or other updates appear.
Fancy taking Instagram’s new dashboard for a spin? To see if you have it, go to your profile page and tap on the hamburger icon (three lines) top right. From the menu that appears, tap on “your activity.”
Time-management tools have become a new trend in the world of tech as companies offer new ways for people to take more control of the way they use their smartphones.
Apple, for example, recently introduced Screen Time while Google came up with the Digital Wellness dashboard. Digital Trends recently compared the two offerings.
Presumably, the tech firms believe such features will work in their favor in the long run, giving people different ways to feel comfortable about their phone usage, and thereby preventing a possible backlash further down the road when they ditch their devices altogether in favor of something a little simpler.
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