Focus modes on Mac: how to set them up so they help

A Focus on a Mac is a set of rules for who and what can interrupt you. You'll find them in System Settings > Focus, and you can switch one on from Control Center in the menu bar. Each Focus lets you choose the people and apps whose notifications still come through. Everything else is held quietly in Notification Center until you look. You can run a Focus on a schedule, share it with your other Apple devices, and on recent versions of macOS add Focus filters that change what some apps show.

Many people turn on Do Not Disturb once, find it silenced something important, and never touch Focus again. Set up with a little care, it is one of the more useful tools on a Mac for protecting a block of work. Here is how each part works.

Where Focus lives on a Mac

Open System Settings and click Focus in the sidebar. You'll see a list of Focus modes. Most Macs start with a few, such as Do Not Disturb, Personal, Sleep and Work, and Add Focus… below the list lets you create others, including a Custom one with your own name and icon. Under the list are two settings that apply to every Focus: Share across devices and Focus status, both covered further down.

To turn a Focus on or off, open Control Center in the menu bar (the icon with two small switches) and click Focus. Click a Focus to turn it on. The menu next to each one usually offers a duration, such as an hour or until this evening, so you don't have to remember to turn it off again.

If you use Focus often, give it its own spot in the menu bar. In recent versions of macOS, go to System Settings > Control Center, find Focus, and choose when it shows in the menu bar. Set to show when active, the icon appears only while a Focus is on, which is a useful reminder that you are in one.

What a Focus actually does

While a Focus is on, notifications from people and apps you haven't allowed are silenced: no banner, no sound. They are not lost. They wait in Notification Center, which you open by clicking the date and time in the menu bar, and you can go through them in one sitting when the Focus ends.

Allow the people and apps that matter

Click a Focus to open its settings. The first section, Allowed Notifications, is where a Focus earns its keep. It has two halves.

• People. Choose whether to allow notifications from a few people and silence everyone else, or to silence a few people and allow everyone else. For a work Focus, allowing a partner, your child's school and your manager is a common start. Call options sit here too, including letting a second call from the same person within three minutes ring through.
• Apps. The same choice for apps: allow a few, or silence a few. Allowing Calendar is usually wise, so meeting alerts still reach you. Chat apps are the ones most worth silencing during deep work.

There is also a setting to allow Time Sensitive notifications. Apps can mark some notifications as time sensitive (a delivery at the door, a reminder set for a specific time), and with this on they come through even from apps that aren't on your allowed list. Leave it on at first, and turn it off if apps start to abuse it.

The trap is allowing too much. If every chat app and every colleague is on the list, the Focus does nothing. Start strict, and add a person or an app only after you've missed something that mattered.

Turn a Focus on automatically

A Focus you have to remember to turn on is a Focus you'll forget. In a Focus's settings, under Set a Schedule, click Add Schedule… and choose a trigger:

1. Time. Pick a start time, an end time and the days. A Work Focus from 9 to 11 on weekdays protects the hours many people find best for hard thinking.
2. Location. The Focus turns on when you arrive somewhere and off when you leave, such as an office or a library. It relies on your Mac knowing where it is.
3. App. The Focus turns on while you use a particular app, which suits a writing app, a code editor or a design tool.

You can add more than one schedule to the same Focus, so a Work Focus can cover two blocks a day, or a different block on Fridays.

Share across devices, and Focus status

Back on the main Focus page, Share across devices keeps your Focus modes in step across the iPhone, iPad and Mac signed in to the same Apple Account. Turn on Work on the Mac and it turns on on the phone too. That's usually what you want, since there's little point silencing the Mac while the phone buzzes next to it. If you'd rather keep them separate, turn the setting off. macOS warns that this also stops the Mac sharing your Focus status.

Focus status lets apps you approve tell other people that you have notifications silenced. In Messages, for example, a contact can see that your notifications are silenced and can choose to notify you anyway if something is important. You can turn status sharing on or off for each Focus.

Focus filters

Focus filters go a step beyond notifications: they change what some apps show while a Focus is on. In a Focus's settings, find Focus Filters and click Add Filter…. What appears depends on your version of macOS and the apps you have, but Apple's own filters commonly include these:

Below the app filters there may also be system filters, such as Appearance, which can switch the Mac to Light or Dark while the Focus is on. Some other apps add filters of their own. For focus, Safari and Mail are the most useful. A Work Focus that hides your personal inbox and the tab group full of shopping removes two of the easiest escapes from hard work.

A Focus setup for a working day

If you want one setup to start from, try this:

1. Use the Work Focus, or create a Custom one called Deep work.
2. Allow people: the two or three who might genuinely need you urgently.
3. Allow apps: Calendar, and anything you'd be in trouble for missing. Silence the rest.
4. Add a time schedule for your best two hours on weekdays.
5. Add a Safari filter for a work Tab Group and a Mail filter for your work account.
6. Leave Share across devices on, so the phone goes quiet too.

Live with it for a week, then adjust. For the rest of a deep work setup (one window, a plan for the session, a clear end), see setting up a Mac for deep work. And because a Focus only holds notifications back for a while, it also helps to cut the notifications themselves down.

Focus modes and Notchpals

If you use Notchpals, know that it can't see your Focus. Work, Do Not Disturb or any other mode can be on and the crew visits as usual, because Notchpals has no way of knowing.

What it does pay attention to is what you are doing. A call with the microphone or camera on keeps every character in, and so does a full screen app on the notch's display or a couple of minutes away from the keyboard. When you want it silent without any of those, the pause in its menu bar lasts an hour or until the next morning, which is the nearest thing Notchpals has to Do Not Disturb. And because repeating reminders draw on one small daily allowance, an ordinary day brings a handful of visits rather than a stream.

The closest thing to a Focus inside Notchpals is a focus session of 25 or 50 minutes, started from the same menu. It needs Bolt, the robot who covers the Focus area, in your crew, and Bolt opens each session with a word or two.

BoltFocus engaged. Your willpower is the firewall now. I trust its code.

While it runs, Bolt is the only regular visitor; a battery close to empty or a meeting minutes away can still break in. A good habit is to start both together: your Work Focus holds the notifications back, and the session holds the crew.