Focus mode

- [Instructor] There are probably several times during the course of a day when you don't want to be interrupted with a phone call, or a text message, or an email, or by any other app on your iOS device that might want your attention. Now, you could just turn your phone off, of course, but then you might miss truly urgent or important calls. You could put your phone in silent mode, but it might still vibrate if you don't manually go in and turn vibration off. And you'll still receive notifications unless you go in and turn notifications off. Now for several years, Apple has included a Do Not Disturb feature for silencing notifications, which worked great, but the problem was that it silenced all notifications. So, with the release of iOS 15, Apple introduced Focus mode, which allows you to be much more selective about which notifications you do and don't want to see based on what you're doing at the time. Let's start by going to Settings and here, we'll find Focus. There are a couple of default suggestions for Focus options here, but you can also create your own custom focuses. Essentially, each Focus option lets you determine which apps can send notifications and who in your contacts can contact you when that Focus is enabled. So, for example, I'll select Work. And since I'm setting this up for the first time, I see this screen telling me that I can allow notifications from important people and apps while I'm working, while silencing the rest across all devices. And that's actually an important thing to note. When you enable a Focus, it's enabled across all iOS devices and Macs on which you're signed into the same iCloud account. You can also have this Work Focus turn on automatically at a specific time, or a specific location, or even when you open certain apps. Another important feature of Focus is that you can let people know that you have your notifications muted, so they don't think you're ignoring them. All right, I'll tap Next. On this next screen, pick the people who will be able to get through to you when you have this Focus enabled. If you've been using your phone for a while, you'll see some suggestions of people you communicate with the most often by phone, or text, or FaceTime, and so on. I'll just tap Add Person, and I'll add a couple of people here, and tap Done. If you need to remove anybody, just tap the minus sign next to that person's name. Under Other People, you can determine who else can get through to you while Focus is enabled. Now, the default is everyone, which kind of defeats the purpose in my mind, but that essentially allows calls to come through, but keeps the phone silent when emails and texts come in. Selecting No One makes it so no calls get through or you can select Favorites, so anyone you added to your favorites in the phone app will get through. Now, you can also allow specific groups if you've created and synced groups from your computer. You can't create groups on your iPhone, so in the Contacts app on your computer, you might want to create a group of people who can always get in touch and then sync it to your phone. I'll leave mine set to Favorites for now. Now, this option down here at the bottom, Allow Repeated Calls, is really important to leave on in my opinion. With this switched on, if you receive a second call from the same number within three minutes of the first call, your phone will ring. So, if there's an emergency or urgent event and someone is trying to get ahold of you by calling repeatedly, they'll get through on the second call, as long as it's within three minutes, and I do prefer to leave that option on myself. I'll tap Done and I'll tap Allow here at the bottom. Next, select the apps that are allowed to send notifications while this Focus is active. Now, because this is the Work Focus, I want to add any of the apps that I use for work, like my Email app, my Calendar app, maybe my Messaging apps, and so on. Take a moment to think about which apps you use daily while working and make sure you add them here. So, select Calendar, Mail, Messages, Phone, and so on, maybe even Reminders here, in this case. I'll tap Done. Notice we also have this switch here to allow time-sensitive notifications. So, even if you don't list an app up top, if it sends a notification that's important right now, you'll still get it. Now this could be an alert from a ride-sharing app, letting you know that your car is arriving or a notification that someone is ringing your smart doorbell. It's hard to say which apps will be considered time-sensitive, so I suggest leaving this on, unless you find that non-important notifications are getting through. I'll tap Allow and now, my Focus is ready. I'll tap Done and now I'm looking at the screen for my Work Focus. I can enable and disable it from the top here, but it's also easier to do that from Control Center as we'll see shortly. You can edit the people in apps that can contact you by tapping them here. Under Options, we have Focus Status. This is where you can enable or disable the option that lets people know you have notifications silenced, and you can see an example of what that message will look like to others. They won't get any other info, other than that you have notifications silenced. It won't say which Focus Mode you're using or anything else. Below Focus Status, we have the option to customize our home screen. So, for example, you could arrange all of your work apps into a single screen and move non-work apps like social media, video players, and games to their own screens. Then, from here, you can enable Custom Pages and then select the screens that will be available when this Focus is enabled. So, maybe I only want the first screen to be enabled. I'll tap Done. Back here in the main work area, we can select Lock Screen to determine whether silenced apps notifications show up on the lock screen. You can also choose to dim the lock screen when this Focus is active. Now, this could be more useful for a Bedtime Focus, so if you wake up in the middle of the night to check the time on your phone, the screen will stay dimmer. And lastly, down here at the bottom, you can schedule this Focus mode to start and end at certain times, or choose a specific location for it to be enabled, or you can select apps, so that opening a specific app will enable that Focus. There's also a Smart Activation option that will have your device turn on this Focus automatically at certain times of the day based on your patterns, like where you physically are and which apps you're using. I'll just cancel that for now. All right, so let's go back to the home screen. Notice I have three home screens that are available on my phone right now. And anytime I want to enable Focus, I can pull down our Control Center and here we find the Focus button. Now, if you just want to enable Do Not Disturb, tap the moon icon, and all notifications will be silenced. Otherwise, tap where it says Focus, and here you can choose which Focus to enable. I'll select Work. And now that it's enabled, I'll only see notifications from the people and apps I've specified. And notice, since I only enabled the first home screen, I don't see my other home screens when I swipe left. I only see the App Library. To turn it off, I just go back to Control Center and I can tap the circle next to Work to disable that Focus. So, it's that easy. I should also mention that as you tap Focus and then tap the three-dot button next to that Focus, we'll see some other options. The options you see here can depend on a few things. First, we have the For 1 hour setting, which does exactly what it says. Select that, and this focus will be enabled for an hour and then will automatically turn off, letting you receive notifications again. The second option will either say Until this evening, or Until this morning, or Until this afternoon, depending on what time of day it is. But it basically just enables the focus for a few hours, a little longer than the one-hour limit. We also have Until I leave this location, which may or may not show up if you're not in a set location. Another option, which you might not see here, is Until this event ends, which will appear if you're in the middle of a time the event you have set in the Calendar app. But these are just other ways to customize when a Focus turns off. So that's how the Focus feature works. And again, you can create as many Focus options as you like. For example, you could create an Exercise Focus to only allow fitness apps to send notifications, or a Movies Focus to only allow specific people to contact you while you're watching a movie. You'll probably be able to come up with several other ideas for Focus Modes to help keep you on the task at hand.