YouTube has more content than a person can watch in a lifetime and we don’t even factor in the boring, uninteresting stuff. Just the stuff that has gone viral and is a bit popular is too much for one person’s life. That said, we definitely try to watch as many videos as possible and it affects productivity. This is probably why Google added a ‘Take a break’ feature in an effort to prevent a YouTube binge.
YouTube – Take a Break
This feature is exclusive to the YouTube apps, so if you have a YouTube binge on your desktop, the only thing that can help is a pomodoro app or anything else that forces you to focus on your work. Make sure you have updated to the latest version of the YouTube app. This feature is available on both iOS and Android.
Open the YouTube app and tap your profile picture at the top right. On the next screen, tap Settings.
On the Settings screen, you will see the option ‘Remind me to take a break’ at the top. Tap it and select how much YouTube you are allowed to watch. You only have preset options to choose from; Never, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes and 180 minutes. Every time the selected time passes, YouTube will let you know to take a break.
You can of course change this at any time, and there’s nothing forcing you to actually listen to the warning YouTube gives you. You can ignore it and keep watching more cat videos if you want.
The pause feature is really just a way to keep track of how much time you’ve spent watching videos on YouTube. The videos, if interesting, can seem quite short when in fact they are quite long and you never know how many you’ve watched. The feature acts as a reality check of how much time you actually spent watching videos on YouTube.
We’re not sure if this feature will be rolled out to desktop users. It may be, but the fact is that users who want to curtail their YouTube viewing habits have plenty of other options. A browser extension can probably tell you when you’ve been using a particular, non-productivity-focused website for too long. There is a whole host of them that are basically built to help you avoid spending too much time on Facebook or Twitter. Such extensions generally also have support for YouTube.
