Monday Productivity Pointers

- [Instructor] Hi, I'm Garrick Chow and welcome to Monday Productivity Pointers. If you're an iPhone or iPad user, and you've upgraded your device to iOS 12, you may have noticed a new feature in System Settings called Screen Time. Screen Time is a collection of tools and features that helps you to monitor and manage the amount of time you spend on your device, or the amount of time your kids spend on their devices. At the top of the main Screen Time Settings here you can see the total amount of time you spent on your device and what categories of apps you've spent that time in. Now in my full course on iOS 12 I go into how to set up the Downtime feature to schedule a period of time where certain apps are unavailable, which can make it easier to stop using your devices when you should be taking a break.

Be sure to see my iOS 12 iPhone, and iPad Essential Training Course for those details. But today, I thought I'd take a look at the app limits feature. Because to be more productive you might want to limit the amount of time you spend on certain types of apps, but still maintain access to the apps that are important for getting work done. So here I'll tap App Limits, which brings me to this screen. I haven't set up any limits yet, so I'll tap Add Limit. On this screen, you can choose which app categories you want to add a time limit to. For example, maybe I feel like I've been spending too much time on social networking apps, and on games.

I can tap those two categories and then I'll tap Add. Here I can set the maximum amount of time I want to allow myself to spend on apps in these categories. So for example, I'll set a limit of an hour and a half. Now because I selected both social apps and games, this limit applies to both categories combined. If I want separate limits for each category, I need to set them up individually. Now if you want, you can tap Customize Days, and here you can specify time limits for different days. So if I wanted to give myself more time for social apps, and games on the weekends, I could do so here.

I'll just tap Back to leave the same time for all days. So, now you can see I've set a limit of an hour and a half for social networking, and games. But just so you can see how this works, I'm going to tap Time, and I'm just going to set this down to one minute. I've already used more than that time today, so we can see what it looks like when you reach your app limit. So, now when I go back and then go out to my home screen, you can see that the icons for social networking apps, like Tweetbot, and Friendly, or Snapchat, or all of these games here, are all dimmed back, and they have this hourglass, or time limit icon next to their names.

Tapping any one of these apps tells me that I've already used up my time. Now, using app limit doesn't really lock you out of your apps or anything like that, you can always tap Ignore Limit and then choose to use the app for 15 minutes before getting a reminder again that I've reached my time limit, or I can choose Ignore Limit for Today, to continue using the app without any more notifications for the day. Now if you're setting up an app limit for a kid's device, and you want to prevent them from going over that limit, you can set a passcode to truly lock them out. I cover how to do that in my iOS 12 course.

But for your own use, the app limit is there more as a reminder, and you still have to rely on a bit of self-control. I'll just cancel this for now. Now you may be wondering if it's possible to limit specific apps instead of entire app categories. It is, but those controls are found in a different place. Let's go back into Screen Time settings, now here at the top I can tap this graph to see its details, but if I scroll down a bit I'll find the most used category. And here I'll see my apps in order of most used. At the bottom of the list, you can tap Show More, to see more of your most used apps.

So if there's a specific app that you want to spend less time using, just tap its name here, and at the bottom of this screen, tap Add Limit. So this is where you can set a time limit for the selected app. I'll set it for two hours, and tap Add. And now Hulu specifically is limited to two hours of viewing. To delete an app limit, just go back into them, here I'll tap Hulu under limits, and here I can tap Delete Limit, and Delete Limit again to remove that.

I can also go back out to the main Screen Time screen, back into App Limits, to the Social Networking and Games limit I set up, and I can also delete the limit here if I want to. All right, so that's how to set app limits in iOS 12's new Screen Time feature. If you find yourself spending too much time in certain apps you may want to give it a try. And that does it for this week. I'm Garrick Chow and we'll see you next time for more Monday Productivity Pointers.