Let me be direct about this. YouTube Shorts is a productivity killer. It pulls you in, wastes your time, and leaves you feeling worse for it. A new YouTube update is fixing that by giving you the option to remove it from your feed completely.
This builds on a Shorts timer feature YouTube introduced back in October. That tool lets you set a daily scrolling limit anywhere between 15 minutes and two hours. Once you hit that limit, YouTube would nudge you to stop watching.
You can now set that timer to zero minutes, which removes the Shorts feed from your YouTube homepage completely.
YouTube’s New Update Lets You Block Shorts
Setting the timer to zero clears Shorts from your YouTube homepage. They won’t be the first thing you see every time you open the app. It’s not a total block, though. Shorts will still show up in your Subscriptions feed, and you can still watch an individual Short if you come across one and choose to click on it.
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If you try to scroll through Shorts anyway, YouTube displays a full-screen message telling you that you’ve hit your daily limit. From there, the choice is yours.
Who Should Use YouTube Shorts Blocks
YouTube confirmed to The Verge that the zero-minute option is already available for parental accounts and is currently rolling out to standard adult accounts. You’ll find it inside your YouTube account settings. If it’s not showing up for you yet, it should appear within the next little while as the rollout continues.
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Parents get a more enforced version of the same feature. When a child hits the Shorts limit, the notification can’t be dismissed. There’s no tapping past it to keep scrolling.
Instagram and TikTok both offer screen time controls of their own, but the zero-minute option gives YouTube a clear advantage for anyone who wants a firm cutoff without uninstalling the app altogether.
