YouTube has more content than a person can watch in a single lifetime and we’re not even taking into account the boring, uninteresting stuff. Just the stuff that’s gone viral and is mildly popular is too much for one person’s lifetime. That said, we definitely try to watch as many videos as we can and it affects productivity. This is probably why Google added a ‘Take a break’ feature in an attempt to stop a YouTube binge from happening.
This feature is exclusive to the YouTube apps so if you’re on a YouTube binge on your desktop, the only thing that can help is a pomodoro app or something else that forces you to focus on work. Make sure you’ve 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 a ‘Remind me to take a break’ option at the top. Tap it, and select how much YouTube you’re 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 expires, YouTube will tell you take a break.
You can of course change this 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 Take a break feature is basically just a way to help you keep track of how much time you’ve spent watching videos on YouTube. The videos, if interesting, can seem pretty short when they are in fact pretty long and you never know how many of them you’ve watched. The feature acts as a reality check as to how much time you’ve actually spent watching videos on YouTube.
We’re not sure if this feature is going to roll out to desktop users. It might but the fact is that users who want to curb their YouTube watching habits have loads of other options. A browser extension can probably tell you when you’ve been using a particular, non-productivity oriented website for too long. There’s a whole host of them that are basically built to help you prevent spending too much time on Facebook, or Twitter. Extensions like that generally have support for YouTube too.
