Mobile phones and apps can be fun and hard to put down. It’s generally recommended that you take regular breaks from using screens. This is especially true for phone screens which are typically closer to your face and more likely to lead to you straining your eyes.
YouTube can be a great resource, with lots of educational and historical content along with countless other videos on pretty much any subject you can possibly imagine. It can be easy to spend hours watching videos, however, it is still important to take regular breaks.
To help with this, YouTube has implemented a feature that you can configure to periodically remind you to take a break.
To configure YouTube’s settings, you need to go into the in-app settings by tapping your profile picture icon in the top-right corner of the app.
On the account page, you need to tap “Settings” to configure the in-app settings.
In YouTube’s settings, tap “General”, the topmost setting.
Tap the first option in the list “Remind me to take a break”. A popup will appear allowing you to configure how frequently the reminder is displayed in hours and minutes. The default time is one hour and fifteen minutes. Once you’ve configured the regularity of the reminders, tap “OK” to save and enable the feature.
Tip: The label underneath the “Remind me to take a break” setting can sometimes display incorrectly. Reporting that the setting is “Off” when the slider is set to the on position. Toggling the setting on and off a few times or restarting the app should fix the issue.
The reminder to take a break, pauses any video being watched and covers the bottom of the screen with the actual reminder. To continue, you can either tap “Settings” and change or disable the reminder, or you can tap “Dismiss” which will resume the video and restart the reminder timer. Additionally, tapping the play button will also resume the video and reset the reminder timer.
Tip: The reminder timer carries across multiple videos. It will also rotate the phone to portrait mode if the video is playing in landscape mode. The reminder timer doesn’t progress while the video is paused.
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