Customize Do Not Disturb with Focus Modes on the Mac

In this video, we’re going to look at focus modes on the Mac. With focus modes, what we’re able to do is customize our Do Not Disturb, we can say who we want to receive notifications from, which apps we want to receive notifications from. And then we can also set when it goes into one of these focus modes, our Mac goes into one of these focus modes. This was introduced with MacOS Monterey. Let’s take a look at focus modes on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac. Now you’re probably familiar with Do Not Disturb, when we turn Do Not Disturb on our Mac, I’m going to go to my control center here, I’m using Mac OS, Monterey, when I go to my control center, what I can do is I can set my Mac to not disturb me, what this will do is this will turn off all notifications. Well with MacOS Monterey, they added some new features to this, we can now customize this Do Not Disturb. What we’re able to do when I click on this is set different focus modes. So when I go over to reading here, what it will do is it’ll turn off all notifications except for any from my wife, and anything from the books app.

I can also have this turned on automatically when I open up the books app. With schools here, what this will do is turn on when I go to the local school that I helped buy, it’s based on geolocation. And it will only allow notifications from the Google Apps and my close friends and family who had sleep here. I received no notifications, except from my close family, such as my wife. And this is set for when I go to bed. It’s based on time. So as you can see, we can customize our different do not disturbed by creating focus modes. So how do we do this? How do we set this up? Well, we need to go to our System Preferences. So I’m going to go up to my Apple menu here. And then we go over to our System Preferences. Under our System Preferences, we need to go to our notifications preference pain, it is now called notifications and focus. So I select this. And then what we do is we go up under focus here, when I click on focus, you’re gonna see I do have my Do Not Disturb, I still have my standard Do Not Disturb.

And this works the same way as it did before. But in addition to that, what I’m able to do is customize any one of these focus modes, or even create my own here. When we select a focus mode, let’s go over to reading here. When we select this, we can see which people I am allowing notifications from So Beth is the only one that I’m allowed notifications from. And then I also can see which apps I’m allowing notifications from. And then our third key to making this all work is when do we want it to turn on we can have it turned on automatically when an app opens. So in this case, it’s going to turn on automatically when books open. And then when I closed books, it’s going to turn back off. Of course, I can always turn it on manually by going up to reading here, or when I go up to my control center. And then we go over to where my Do Not Disturb is when I click on this, I can set reading here.

When I do that, we can see that reading has turned down. And now I’m only going to be able to receive notifications from my wife and from the books app. To turn it back off, all we do is just go back up to our control center. And then you’re going to see it’s in reading mode, what I do is I click on the icon. If I do not click on this icon here, what it’s going to do is bring me back to where I can see all of my focuses, I just want to turn it off. So the easiest way of doing that is just going over to the icon here. And when I click on the eye icon, it turns it off. I click on the icon again, it turns it on, I want to switch focuses, I go over to the right click on this here, not the icon. And now I can switch focuses. So let’s go ahead and turn this off here, click on the icon, and it is off. Now let’s go and take a look at how we can create a focus. So let’s say I wanted to create a new focus actually, let’s go and recreate my reading focus. What I do is I click on the minus here to delete a focus. That’s what I’m going to do. So I’m gonna delete this and delete it. Now I want to recreate it. I go down to the plus here, and then I click on plus. Now from here we have a number of different on I’m going to call templates. I can go and select reading here and it’ll create a reading focus and then I can customize it. That’s what we’re going to do. But I also want to show you that you can customize your own when we customize our own. What we’re able to do is set what the name of it is here, what the color of the icon is. And then I can also set what the glyph For icon is,

now I’m going to go with the reading focus. So we’re gonna go back over to my template here. And then we go over to reading, when I select one of these, we cannot customize it. So if you want to call it a custom name, maybe you want to use custom here, I’m just gonna go with reading here. And now we can see we have my reading focus. So I have that new focus, but it’s not going to do anything yet. The next thing I need to do is I need to set who I am allowing notifications from. So I’m going to go over to people here. And then what we do is we click on the plus. And we select who we want to have notifications from.

So I’m going to go with Beth here. And I add her in there. So now I’m going to receive notifications from Beth, what about the apps? Well, being that I’m using the books app, what I would do is I want to have notifications come from that books app. So I go over to apps here. And then I click on the plus again, just like with books, and I select my app, I’m going to go with books, I can select multiple apps. So if you had the Kindle app, what you could do is select the Kindle app in here as well. So when I click on Add, and now we have books in there, and we also have birth for my people. We do have some options here. When I click on Options, what I’m able to do is allow time sensitive notifications. What are these? Well, these are notifications that are based on time like from the calendar app, you may still want to receive those maybe you have an event or a reminder in your Reminders app or in your calendar app that you want to receive, even though you’re reading, maybe it’s to take some medication, or to go to an event, even though you’re reading, you still want to have that notification.

Well, as long as there’s a time in it. What this will do when I allow this, it will allow those notifications to come through. I usually recommend leaving this on time sensitive notifications are okay, you don’t want to receive any other notifications. If they’re not based on time, I won’t receive them. But time based notifications you may want to receive. I can also set if I want to allow calls from favorites. Now right now, I’m only going to allow calls from Beth. But you can also have it from favorites in your contacts. You can also select if you want to have it from one of your groups. When I click on this, I can select on one of my groups in the Contacts app. If you do not want to receive calls, then what I do is I turn this off, I’m going to leave this off for this focus. And then our last one here is allow repeated calls, I like to leave this one on. So if someone calls me it’s not going to come through, but if they call me again, within three minutes, then it will go through. So someone calls me twice within three minutes, it will go through.

So now what I’m going to do is click on OK. The next thing we need to do is we need to set when it is turned on right now I could turn it on by clicking on the slider here, or by going to my control center here. But I want to do this automatically, I want to have it turned on when I open up the books app, I start reading the focus turns on I stopped reading the focus turns off. To do that what we do is we go down to where we have turned on automatically, we have a few different options here. I click on the plus here. And we can set if we want it to be time based at a specific time. If we want it to be location based, when I’m at a specific location, like with the school, I have it. So where I’m at the school, when I’m at the school, the school focus turns on. And then we have at base, this is what we’re going to go. So I’m going to select app based here. And then I just select the books app. And again, I could select the Kindle app as well, if I had it on here, click on Add. And now it’s all set. I’ve just created that focus. If I want to share this with my other devices, I can do that as well. I usually recommend leaving this on as well. So now if I open up the books app on my iPad or my iPhone, it’ll turn the focus mode on on all of my devices. So now I have it all set. Let’s go ahead and close this and open up the books app, I go down to my doc here. And then I click on it when I click on it, let’s not click on it yet. When I click on it, when I go to my control center, you’re going to see that the reading focus is going to be turned on here. So let’s go ahead and click on this to open it up. And now my reading focus is turned on. How do I know that? Well, when I go up to my control center here, you’re going to see that my reading is turned on. I did not turn this on. Now let’s go and quit the books app.

I go up under books here and we go to quit and when I do and then if we go back over to our control center here, you’re going to see that I am no longer in my reading focus. It turned off automatically. If I were to open up the books app again. This would go back into the reading focus. And again, it would share that same focus mode with all of my other devices because I have it set to shared. So that’s how we can create and use focus modes. On the Mac. Basically, it’s a customized version of Do Not Disturb, we can set who we want to receive notifications from, and which apps we want to receive notifications from. And then we can set when that focus mode is started, we can have it be location based, we can have it based on an app. And then we can also have it based on time. And then of course, we can always turn it on manually by going to our control center. We set this all up in our System Preferences under notifications and focus, just go to the focus tab. And then from there, what you’re able to do is create an edit your focuses. You can set who you want to receive notifications from, which apps you want to receive notifications from and how that notification or that focus is started. So that’s how we use focus modes on the Mac. Again, this was introduced with Mac OS, Monterey, so if you have an earlier version of Mac OS, you will not be able to use focus modes.