How to Use Instagram’s “Your Activity” Feature to Restrict the Use of Your App
Earlier this year, I finally fell into a rabbit hole called Instagram Stories and now I spend too much time on Instagram. This week, the app began rolling out a new feature to combat Insta addiction, the Your Activity tracker, which shows you how much time you spend in the app and lets you set limits to help cut down on the hours you spend. scrolling the feed every day.
To find the new feature, launch the Instagram app, go to your profile page, and then click on the hamburger icon (three lines one above the other) in the upper right corner of the screen. From there, click “Your Actions” to launch the function and change the settings.
If you’re an avid Instagram user, you’ll want to pull yourself together. First, you’ll see a graph of how much time you’ve spent in the app over the last week, as well as the average for the week:
If this number is too high (and it probably is), Instagram offers several options to help you reduce it. Tap Notification Settings to customize which push notifications you want the app to send you, which can help you avoid getting trapped when you need to work on something else. Tap on the “Set a daily reminder” option to receive a special notification when you have exceeded the daily time limit that you have set for yourself in the app.
If you don’t see the Your Activity tracker in your Instagram app, make sure you are using the latest version. It’s also possible that it hasn’t been released to you yet – I didn’t have it in my Android app, but for example my colleague Lifehacker had it in his iOS app.
While you wait, consider exploring a similar tool that Facebook (the owner of Instagram) has deployed to their social media apps. Open the Facebook Settings menu, scroll down and you should see the Your Time on Facebook option, which will give you the same information – and more settings – as the Instagram activity tracker.
You can also use the Screen Time feature of an iOS device or the Digital Wellbeing feature of an Android device to see how your Instagram (or Facebook) uses tracks in comparison to the rest of your life on your smartphone. Perhaps you are not as addicted as you think?