Best Method to Limit Social Media Time on Your Browser

Social media addiction is a huge problem in many parts of the world. The average internet user now spends around 2:27 hours each day on social media, and this, in turn, causes a significant number of other psychological problems to human beings.

You should start your own journey to get rid of that addiction, and we are not here to try to solve that problem (our foss-related website is not a psychological one), but we are here to introduce a nifty tool that could help you along the way.

Browser Addon to Limit Social Media Time

LeechBlock is an open source browser extension that works on both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi… etc), and allows you to specify the maximum allowed time that you can spend on social media sites (or any website) each day.

If you exceed the maximum time, the browser addon will prevent you from accessing the website.

The idea is quite simple and straightforward: Just enter the websites you want to reduce your addiction to, and the maximum number of minutes allowed each day, and that’s it.

You will be able to see a time counter on the websites you selected so that you can organize your activities and know how much time remaining you have got.

Install LeechBlock App To Limit Time on Social Media

Step 1: Just install the Firefox addon or the Chromium-based addon depending on the web browser you are currently using.

Step 2: Go to the settings of LeechBlock. You can do this from the addons page on your web browser. You should see similar options to this screenshot:

Step 3: LeechBlock creates groups for websites known as “Block sets”. You can have the same blocking conditions – if you like – applied to multiple websites instead of just one by one. You can apply different blocking conditions to different block sets.

Enter the domain names of the social media websites that you want to limit your time on in the second text field (one in each line).

Then, enter the time periods during the day when you wish to activate this block set (simply press the “All day” button). And make sure these checkboxes are toggled to limit social media time on all days during the week:

Step 4: Enter the maximum allowed browsing time for all the websites (combined, not just one) in the block set. For example, 80 minutes per day total:

Step 5: Save changes and exit:

Optional: If you want to use different blocking conditions for different websites, then simply put them in different block sets instead of putting all of them in one.

If you browse social media websites now, you will see that there is a counter telling you the remaining time you have left:

What Is a Good Time Limit for Social Media?

This depends on you, and what social media websites are you using.

Ideally, you may not want to spend more than 1/1.5 hours each day on these websites. But you shouldn’t be too strict on yourself in the first days of fighting your social media addiction, especially if you are used to spending much more time than that on these sites.

You should gradually decrease the maximum allowed time you allocate to these sites, which should leave time for you to do other activities you like in your real life.

Conclusion

LeechBlock is a very helpful browser addon to help you with your addiction to social media websites. It has many interesting advanced options and you can explore different scenarios with it however you like.

The idea is not to cut your access completely from these websites, but rather, to gradually limit and reduce the time you spend on them until you can finally quit them and remove them from your life.

The browser addon is open source and licensed under the MIT2.0 license. You can browse its source code for Firefox or Chromium if you wish to see its content.

M.Hanny Sabbagh

Hanny is a computer science & engineering graduate with a master degree, and an open source software developer. He has created a lot of open source programs over the years, and maintains separate online platforms for promoting open source in his local communities.

Hanny is the founder of FOSS Post.