Facebook and Instagram Will Show You How Much Time You Waste on Them

Facebook and Instagram, only one of which is still even remotely enjoyable, announced new tools Wednesday aimed at helping users keep track of time spent on their apps.

August 1, 2018

Among the most efficient ways one can easily waste most (if not all) of their time is to meticulously keep track of wasted time, thus completing the circle. Now, Facebook and Instagram are here to help you with that.

"We want people's time [online] to be intentional and meaningful—that's actually good for the business," Gretchen Sloan, Facebook's head of communications, toldCNN Wednesday. "I don't know how people will react when they see the time that they spent. It'll be interesting to learn that."

An activity dashboard, a daily reminder, and a new notifications-limiting tool were announced for both apps Wednesday. The fresh features, according to a press release, were created with the help of "leading mental health experts and organizations." Once widely rolled out, the features can be accessed in either app's settings page. Though the update offers the ease of limiting or outright muting push notifications for a period of time, it does not automatically lock the app once you've hit whatever you feel your time quota should be.

Facebook, which has been at the subject of an increasingly heated debate about misinformation in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, was slammed just last month for making it bafflingly easy for anti-vaccine groups to proliferate on the platform. Laughably dumb groups of this nature, as the Daily Beast pointed out, rank at the top of searches for words like "vaccines." That's, um, clearly a problem. And while we're on the subject, let's not forget Mark Zuckerberg was named Misinformer of the Year by Media Matters for America last year.

Anyway, imagine there's no Facebook. It's easy if you try.