Apple’s Focus feature on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac can silence those interruptions, but Focus is considerably more complex than the straightforward Do Not Disturb feature it replaced in 2021. Misconfiguring Focus such that it activates unexpectedly can cause you to miss important calls, messages, and other notifications.

What Focus Does

Focus lets you create customized notification environments that block unwanted interruptions while allowing important ones through. You can have a Focus for different situations—when you’re at work, eating dinner, at the gym, and more—each with its own rules about when it activates and which people and apps can reach you.

When a Focus is active, it can:

• Silence notifications from selected people and apps
• Allow specific people and apps to break through
• Change your Lock Screen appearance
• Hide certain Home Screen pages
• Automatically reply to messages explaining you’re unavailable
• Filter content in apps like Mail, Calendar, and Messages
• Make a certain profile or tab group active in Safari

Focus can share your settings across all your Apple devices, which saves you from having to configure it on each device but can also create confusing interactions.

The Built-In Focus Modes

Apple provides three essential Focus modes that cover most people’s needs:

• Do Not Disturb: A general-purpose Focus for when you need to ensure your iPhone doesn’t interrupt you. It’s ideal for doctor appointments, workouts, movies, and similar situations. You can schedule it, but it’s often best to activate it manually from Control Center for a specific amount of time or until you leave the current location.
• Sleep: This Focus activates according to the Sleep schedule you set on the iPhone (in either Settings > Focus > Sleep or in the Health app) to minimize nighttime interruptions. It lets you choose a specific Lock Screen, Home Screen, and Apple Watch face to limit distractions at night.
• Driving: Automatically activates when your iPhone connects to a car’s Bluetooth system or detects driving motion. (The Bluetooth connection may be best if you’re frequently a passenger and want to use your iPhone while being driven.) It blocks nearly all notifications to keep your attention on the road and can send custom automatic replies to people who text you.

For further customization, you can create additional Focus modes—Apple suggests modes for Gaming, Mindfulness, Personal, Reading, and Work. For instance, if you take a spin class every Tuesday at noon and yoga on Thursdays at 7 AM, you could create a Focus for Working Out that would automatically activate during those times.

Configuring a Focus

To set up a Focus, go to Settings > Focus on your iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Focus on your Mac. Select the Focus you want to configure or create a new one, then:

1. Choose allowed people: Decide whether to allow or silence notifications from specific people. You can also specify whether phone calls from certain groups (Allowed People, Favorites, Contacts, or Contacts groups) can break through.
   
2. Choose allowed apps: Similarly, allow or silence specific apps. You can also enable Time Sensitive Notifications, which lets urgent alerts (like delivery notifications or security alerts) come through even from disallowed apps.
   
3. Set a schedule: Have the Focus turn on at certain times, locations (on when you arrive, off when you leave), or when using specific apps (but not when apps are in the background). App-based triggers are useful for presentations, live performances, and games. A Smart Activation option on the iPhone can automatically turn on a Focus based on your location, app usage, and time of day.
   
4. Add Focus Filters: Customize how Calendar, Mail, Messages, Safari, and others behave when the Focus is active—for example, showing only certain Safari tab groups and your work email accounts during a Professional Focus.
   
5. Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing: If you have Apple Intelligence enabled, this option “intelligently” allows priority notifications to interrupt you and silences others. It doesn’t override your explicit settings for allowing or silencing notifications.

The Complexity Problem

While Focus is powerful, its complexity can create unpredictable behavior. Here are common pitfalls to avoid:

• Unexpected activation: With automatic schedules based on time, location, and apps, it’s hard to predict when a Focus might turn on. You may not realize notifications are being silenced until you’ve missed something important. This is especially important if your routine is interrupted. Perhaps you normally work out at noon, but today you are at a professional conference or dealing with a family emergency.
• Cross-device confusion: By default, Focus syncs across all your Apple devices via the Share Across Devices option. Syncing means a Focus activated on your iPhone—such as Sleep—might also silence notifications on your Mac when you’re working late and need to communicate with colleagues. Consider turning off Share Across Devices unless you’re certain you want synchronized behavior.
• Unpredictable AI: Focus includes two features that rely on machine learning—Smart Activation and Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing—to make contextual decisions about when Focus should activate and which notifications are important enough to bypass it. We recommend against using them because they make an already unpredictable scenario even more unpredictable.
• Silenced notifications indicator: When a Focus is active, people who text you in Messages see that your notifications are silenced. While this can be helpful, it can also confuse others when a Focus activates unexpectedly.
  
• The forgotten Focus: A Focus that activates automatically when you go to a specific location or open a particular app might remain active longer than you expected. For instance, what if a Focus activates when Mail is your frontmost app, but you have to leave unexpectedly and your Mac doesn’t sleep automatically, so Mail remains the active app over the weekend? That might be particularly confusing when a Focus Filter hides certain accounts or data.

Practical Recommendations

To get the benefits of Focus without the confusion:

• Keep it simple: Start with Do Not Disturb, Sleep, and Driving. These three cover the needs of most people and have the most predictable behavior. If you created Focus modes you’re not using, delete them.
• Be conservative with triggers: If you add schedules or triggers based on location or apps, keep them to a minimum. The more triggers you add, the harder it becomes to predict when a Focus will be active.
• Allow more calls: These days, unexpected calls from people you know well are fairly uncommon, and those that do happen are more likely to be important. So consider allowing calls from family and close friends (perhaps via Favorites or a Contacts group) and enabling Allow Repeated Calls, which lets someone through if they call twice within three minutes.
• Check Focus status when troubleshooting: If you or someone you know is missing notifications, check whether a Focus is unexpectedly active. The easiest place to check is Control Center.
• Review Share Across Devices: If you experience unexpected Focus behavior, turn off Share Across Devices and configure each device’s Focus settings independently.
• Control notifications directly: Rather than rely on Focus, limit notifications to just those that are actually important to you. Many apps are unnecessarily chatty.

Focus is a powerful tool for managing the constant stream of notifications from our devices, but it requires careful configuration. When in doubt, keep it simple: Sleep to protect your sleeping hours, Driving to block distractions in the car, and Do Not Disturb for ad hoc appointments and performances may be all you need.

(Featured image by iStock.com/DragonImages)

Social Media: Apple’s Focus can silence distractions when you need quiet time, but its complexity can cause you to miss important notifications. Learn how to configure it safely—and avoid the pitfalls that lead to missed calls and messages.

In iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey, Apple has gone even further. Do Not Disturb is now called Focus, and Apple has made it more powerful and flexible. Focus can turn on automatically at certain times, at particular locations, or when you’re using certain apps so you can avoid interruptions during activities like working out, doing homework, eating dinner, or gaming. But not all interruptions—you can allow certain people and apps to break through the cone of silence. A Focus can also hide or show certain Home screen pages, prevent notifications from appearing on the Lock screen, and more. Plus, all your devices can share the same Focus settings—we’re showing iPhone screenshots below, but the interface is identical in iPadOS and similar on the Mac, where you’ll find it in System Preferences > Notifications & Focus > Focus.

In Settings > Focus, Apple provides a pre-built Focus for Do Not Disturb, Driving, and Sleep to match the old Do Not Disturb options:

• Do Not Disturb: This catch-all Focus takes over from the old Do Not Disturb setting.
• Driving: This Focus replaces the old Do Not Disturb While Driving option. It’s unusual in that it doesn’t allow any app notifications through at all (eyes on the road!). It also lets you write a custom auto-reply for those who text you while you’re driving.
• Sleep: If you use Apple’s sleep management features in the Health app, you’ll use this Focus to control which notifications can get through while you’re asleep.

Apart from those, Apple makes six suggestions: Personal and Work (in the main list), and Fitness, Gaming, Mindfulness, and Reading (when you add a new Focus). You can also create a custom Focus from scratch.

Apple’s suggestions are special in one important way. Fitness, Gaming, and Mindfulness can turn on automatically: when you’re engaged in a workout, when you connect a wireless controller, and when you’re in a Mindfulness session started from your Apple Watch, respectively.

When configuring a suggested Focus or creating a new one from scratch, Focus runs you through several setup screens. One has you choose people whose notifications you want to come through regardless, and what to do about incoming phone calls. The other screen lets you pick which apps can notify you when the Focus is active, with an additional option to allow notifications marked as Time Sensitive through regardless. (Time Sensitive notifications include timed Reminders alerts, for instance, and are usually best left enabled.)

Once your Focus is ready, you can configure various options, including:

• Focus Status: Enable this option to allow apps to alert those who message you that you have notifications silenced.
• Home Screen: If your Focus involves you using the Home screen a lot, you can have it hide notification badges that might lure you into another app or even hide entire Home screen pages that could be distracting.
• Lock Screen: If you might be looking at your Lock screen while the Focus is active, you can have it dim automatically and hide or show silenced notifications as appropriate.
• Schedule or Automation: Although you can turn on any Focus from Control Center, it may be easier to have it turn itself on automatically at certain times, in particular locations, or when certain apps are active.

As with any new feature, it’s going to take a bit to figure out how to make Focus work best for you. We’re still learning it ourselves, but here are some recommendations:

• To identify when a Focus would be helpful, wait until you find notifications irritating and then think about which ones you’d want a Focus to block.
• Create just one or two Focuses at first. You don’t want to end up with a bunch that interact in unexpected ways and cause you to miss important notifications.
• Be careful with schedules and automations. An automation that invokes the Reading Focus when Books is open might work well for reading before bed but could be problematic if you read while waiting for a meeting to start.
• It may be safest to allow silenced notifications to appear on the Lock screen so you can easily see what you missed afterward and adjust the Focus as necessary.
• You can manually invoke a Focus by tapping the Focus button in Control Center and selecting the one you want. Tap the ••• button to the right of the Focus to specify when it should turn off automatically, or just tap the Focus again to turn it off.
  

Newness aside, Focus looks like it will help us all cut down on distracting notifications. And if all else fails, stick with just Do Not Disturb, Driving, and Sleep to replicate what we had before.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Daisy-Daisy)

Here’s the problem. Even more so than before the pandemic, our Macs feel like personal spaces. Just as you’d add a houseplant and a special photo to your desk at work, you’ve probably personalized your Mac in a variety of ways. Custom desktop wallpaper, for instance, or a screensaver that displays favorite photos. Plus, you may carry on personal conversations, possibly even intimate ones, if you catch our drift, using the same Mac that you use for communicating with those aforementioned clients, colleagues, and bosses.

We’re not here to admonish you or nag about inappropriate behavior. (Though we will encourage you to consider some sage advice from a friend’s mother, who noted drily that you should never put anything on the Internet that you don’t want to appear on the front page of the New York Times. And that was before Twitter.)

No, as we said, the goal here is to help you avoid the embarrassment caused by people who are viewing your screen seeing things they shouldn’t see, something that the New York Times has also covered. Some areas of concern include:

• Desktop & Screen Saver: Jobs have been lost by inappropriate selections for desktop wallpaper and photo screen savers. Make sure, if you’re ever going to share your screen, that randomly chosen desktop pictures and folders of screen saver photos don’t contain anything that could be problematic. To be safe, choose an Apple-provided desktop picture and a pattern-based screen saver in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver.
  
• Icons on the Desktop: We all toss files on the desktop, but if preview icons or even filenames could cause trouble—you might not want your boss seeing Resumé.doc—corral them in another folder before you share your screen. Also note that many videoconferencing apps can limit their screen sharing to particular windows rather than the entire screen, which prevents people from seeing your desktop.
• Web browser tabs: Limiting screen sharing to a particular window won’t help if it’s a Web browser window with multiple tabs. Even if you avoid accidentally navigating to a tab with NSFW content, its title alone might be problematic. For safety, always start a new browser window when sharing Web content.
• Open apps and documents: As with icons on the desktop when sharing your entire screen, you may not want just anyone seeing what other apps and documents you have open. Again, stick to sharing a specific window. To avoid mistakes when selecting the window to share, we recommend hiding or quitting all unrelated apps before sharing your screen.
• Document comments: When collaborating on a document, some people are less than politic with their in-document comments. If comments are visible when you’re sharing a document with people who wouldn’t otherwise see them, hard feelings could ensue. Make sure to hide or resolve such comments before sharing.
• Notifications: Even if you have hidden or quit Calendar, Messages, Mail, and similar apps, their notifications could still appear at an inopportune time. You might not want colleagues to know about an ob-gyn appointment, meeting with a potential employer, or racy conversations with a coworker. The solution is Do Not Disturb, easily enabled from Control Center in macOS 11 Big Sur and by scrolling up in Today view in Notification Center in earlier versions of macOS. Also, although it won’t help with online screen sharing, it’s a good idea to enable the “When mirroring to TVs and projectors” option in System Preferences > Notifications > Do Not Disturb.
  

This may all sound a little overwhelming, but there is one trick that will help you avoid most of these problems at once. In System Preferences > Users & Groups, create a new user account dedicated to screen sharing and presentations. In that user account, you can be sure to have innocuous desktop pictures, screen savers, clean Web browser windows, and permanent Do Not Disturb. The hardest part will be figuring out the best way to share documents you use in presentations between your accounts (try the /Users/Shared folder or an online file sharing solution like Dropbox). Then, before you start a call when you’ll need to share your screen, choose your new account from the Fast User Switching menu from the right side of the menu bar (set up that menu in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Options).

One final piece of advice. When you’ve accomplished what you need to by sharing your screen, stop sharing it and switch back to video. That way, you can’t accidentally do something in the shared window that might be embarrassing. Similarly, when a meeting is over or you’re dropping off for a while, it’s best to leave the call. Stopping video and muting audio are good tools, but it’s easy to click in the wrong spot accidentally and think you’re safe when, in fact, your mic or camera is still live.

(Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)

(Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)

(Featured image by Kristina Flour on Unsplash)

But iOS 12 offers more than just a speed boost. Apart from adding fripperies like new animoji, text effects, and camera effects in Messages and FaceTime, iOS 12 helps you use your device less. That’s important, as it becomes increasingly obvious that many people spend more time than they’d like on addictive social media apps, games, and cat videos.

Screen Time

The marquee feature for helping you control device usage is Screen Time. Found in the Settings app, Screen Time reports on how much time you spend using different apps, how often you pick up your device, and how many notifications interrupt you. You can check it anytime and get weekly reports, and use this information to help you reduce undesirable usage.

Screen Time has two helpful options, Downtime and App Limits. With Downtime, you can specify a time period when you can only receive phone calls and use specific apps you set in Always Allowed. App Limits let you set how long you may use certain categories of apps. You can ignore the limit, extending it for 15 minutes or for the rest of the day, but that’s cheating, right?

Even better, you can set Downtime and App Limits for a child’s iPhone or iPad, ensuring that they can’t play games after bedtime or text their friends during dinner.

Notification Management

It’s easy to become overwhelmed with notifications, especially if you have chatty friends in messaging apps. iOS 12 can reduce the impact of non-stop notifications. On the Lock screen, iOS 12 now groups message threads and multiple notifications from the same app. Tapping a group expands it so you can see the details.

Plus, with a feature called Instant Tuning, you can change notification settings for an app right from a notification. Swipe left on a notification and tap Manage. Instant Tuning also lets you send notifications to Notification Center silently so they don’t interrupt you but are available later.

Do Not Disturb

In the “it’s about time” department, iOS 12 beefs up Do Not Disturb so it works more the way people do. When you bring up Control Center and force-touch the Do Not Disturb button, it expands to let you turn on Do Not Disturb for 1 hour, for the rest of the day, or until you leave your current location. The beauty of these new options is that they disable Do Not Disturb automatically so you don’t have to remember—and potentially miss important notifications. Plus, a new Bedtime option in Settings > Do Not Disturb dims the display and silences overnight notifications until you unlock your device in the morning.

Siri Shortcuts

Another new feature, Siri Shortcuts, aims to help you use your device more effectively. As Siri learns your routines, it will start suggesting shortcuts for common actions, either on the Lock screen or when you pull down on the Home screen to search. You can see its suggestions in Settings > Siri & Search > All Shortcuts, and for those that seem useful, record a custom phrase that will invoke the shortcut. Plus, a new Shortcuts app lets you create more complex shortcuts that can run multiple steps at once.

Smaller Changes

Those may be the most significant changes in iOS 12, but they’re far from the only ones. Here’s a sampling of other refinements you’ll notice:

• Apple has redesigned the iBooks app and renamed it Books.
• The News, Stocks, and Voice Memos apps also received redesigns, Stocks and Voice Memos are now available on the iPad, and all three have made the jump to the Mac in Mojave, with their data synced via iCloud.
• A new Measure app uses augmented reality to help you measure objects in the real world.
• In Settings > Battery, iOS 12 shows graphs of battery usage and activity for the last 24 hours or the last 10 days.

iOS 12 has even more minor improvements that we’ll be sharing in the coming months, so watch this space!

Getting Started

After you install iOS 11, you’ll notice a few things right off. Dock icons no longer have names, and many Apple apps now have the bold text design Apple brought to the Music and News apps in iOS 10.

Although the new Automatic Setup feature won’t help you today, when you next get a new iOS device, it can transfer many settings from an older iOS 11 device automatically. Similarly, the new Share Your Wi-Fi feature lets you send your Wi-Fi network’s password to another iOS 11 device that tries to connect.

You may not need a new iPhone or iPad anyway, since iOS 11 can help you recover precious space. Choose Settings > General > iPhone/iPad Storage and you can offload unused apps (while keeping their settings and data), delete old Messages conversations automatically, and see how much space each app consumes. Deleting music from the Music sub-screen (tap Edit) will help too.

Special Screens

Apple redesigned Control Center, which most people still get to by swiping up from the bottom of the screen (iPad users keep swiping up after the Dock appears, and iPhone X users will have to swipe down from the right-hand top of the screen). It’s back to a single page of icons, and you can access additional options by pressing and holding on any set of controls. Even better, you can add (and remove) controls in Settings > Control Center > Customize Controls. 

The Lock screen is all you’ll see while in the car by default now, thanks to the Do Not Disturb While Driving feature. It blocks notifications and prevents you from using your iPhone while at the wheel, all while auto-replying to people who text you. Calls still come through to your car’s Bluetooth system, and texts from people designated as favorites can break through the texting cone of silence. Passengers can disable Do Not Disturb While Driving easily from a notification on the Lock screen.

Smaller Changes and App Updates

A few smaller changes that you’ll appreciate include:

• Siri sounds more natural, can do translations, and uses on-device learning to understand you better and provide more useful results.
• On an iPhone, a new Emergency SOS feature will call 911 and notify your emergency contacts of your location after you press the Sleep/Wake button five times quickly and swipe the Emergency SOS button. Tap Settings > Emergency SOS to set this up.
• The password auto-fill feature now suggests stored login information for many apps right from the QuickType bar above the keyboard—manage this in Settings > Accounts & Passwords > App & Website Passwords.

Many of iOS 11’s built-in apps receive significant changes as well:

• Camera: New file formats will make your videos and photos take up less space. There are a few new filters, and Camera can finally scan QR codes, which simplify loading Web sites, getting contact info, and connecting to Wi-Fi networks.
• Photos: You can now edit the video in a Live Photo and apply looping, bouncing, and long exposure effects. Photos can at long last play animated GIFs and has a new Animated smart album to hold them.
• Files: This major new app replaces the iCloud Drive app. Look in Files for access not just to iCloud Drive, but also to files on your device and in other cloud sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive.
• Messages: A new app drawer at the bottom of the screen tries to entice you to use iMessage apps. Most are just stickers, but some are useful and Apple provides a new Apple Pay app here that lets you make person-to-person payments.
  
   
• Maps: Apple has added indoor maps of some airports and malls to Maps. Maps also now provides lane guidance on more complicated roads.
• Notes: The new Instant Notes feature make starting a note as simple as tapping the Lock screen of an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, or the optional Notes button in Control Center. A note can now look like lined paper or graph paper (tap the Share button, then tap Lines & Grids). You can also now scan a document. The idea is that you then sign it with the Apple Pencil and send it on its way. Notes can also now find text in Apple Pencil handwriting.

Take some time to explore—we’re liking these new features and we think you will too! It’s likely safe to upgrade to iOS 11 now, but check our upgrade advice first.