If you’ve ever opened YouTube for one video and somehow lost 30 minutes to Shorts, there’s finally a way out.
YouTube is rolling out a small but surprisingly effective update. This update lets you remove Shorts from your homepage entirely, no third-party hacks needed.
The trick? Set your Shorts timer to zero minutes.
This builds on a screen time feature YouTube introduced back in October. That feature originally let users cap daily Shorts viewing between 15 minutes and two hours. Now, there’s a new option: set that limit to zero, and Shorts effectively disappear from your main feed.
It’s not quite a full block, but it’s close. Once enabled, Shorts won’t show up on your homepage at all. As a result, you won’t get pulled into the scroll the moment you open the app. If you do try to access Shorts, YouTube throws up a full-screen reminder saying you’ve hit your daily limit. This puts a deliberate pause between you and the next swipe.
There are a couple of caveats. Shorts can still appear in your Subscriptions tab, and you can still watch individual clips if you open them directly. So this isn’t YouTube going cold turkey on short-form video. It is more like adding friction where it matters most.
The feature is already live for parental controls, where it’s even stricter. Kids won’t be able to bypass the limit prompt at all, making it a more locked-down experience. For everyone else, the zero-minute option is currently rolling out, so you might not see it in your settings just yet.
Compared to similar tools on TikTok or Instagram, this feels a bit more decisive. Instead of just nudging you to stop, YouTube is giving you a way to avoid the temptation altogether. You don’t have to delete the app or overhaul your habits either.
It’s a small tweak, but if Shorts has been quietly hijacking your screen time, this might be the cleanest fix yet.
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