With mobiles that look more like computers than phones, it is more and more difficult to stay isolated by avoiding all kinds of interference. It’s not just about games, social media, messaging apps … even connected devices can interfere at the most inconvenient time and this is something that we can avoid with the steps that we will now explain.
Thanks to the Google Home app and thanks to Digital Wellbeing, we can reduce the distractions caused by mobile phones and connected devices while we are working or studying. It is about setting up a series of filters to define hours of use, people access, notifications …
Filters in digital well-being
And the first thing we’ll see is how to apply a series of filters to limit the people who can access the connected devices and select those who escape (or not) these limitations.
To do this, simply enter the Google Home app and click on the “Settings”. Within the “Settings” we will look for a section called “Digital well-being” in “Functions”. This is the starting point for configuring the “Filters”.
It will be the system that, step by step, explains everything we do. First of all, we will have to decide who can access content and applications; either all, or if we prefer, only supervised accounts and guests. Then we will have to decide whether we want to apply this limitation to all devices or only to some of them.
From here we go establish what type of content we want to control starting with the videos where we can allow them all to filter only the videos or allow none.
Then comes the control of “News and Podcasts”, determining whether we want them to be played on devices as well as whether we want from those devices we can make calls, answer questions or take action. . We can even limit the platforms from which you can listen to music.
This is the first part of the check that we can do, because the next step the system offers programs a rest time. A period of time with a start and end time during which the selected devices will not respond, although alarms and timers will continue to operate.
The first step refers to who will have access and what devices we want to set up with this schedule. We can customize the schedules or use one of those offered by the assistant. In the tests, I configured the time from 12:05 a.m. to 6 a.m. as a time so as not to interact with the devices.
Once the process is complete, we can change all the settings that we have created in a personalized way for each device. If we click on “Digital Wellbeing” in the “Settings” we will access a list with all the devices that we have configured. If we click on each of them we can modify all the parameters that we have previously configured.
With these filters we can set limits on who in the home can use a Google Nest speaker or display, defining from access to music with explicit lyrics or which video services are activated.
