Do Not Disturb

Reduce Interruptions is a new Focus in iOS 18 that judges on the fly which notifications seem important, using Apple Intelligence.

Setting up a Focus mode by hand is a bit of a chore. You need to know exactly which contacts and apps you want to silence and let through. You need to keep maintaining them as you add new contacts and download new apps.

Reduce Interruptions is a new Focus mode that’s a slightly smarter Do Not Disturb. There’s no work necessary. And, if you do have a highly customized existing Focus, you can add its smarts on top of your existing rules and customizations. Here’s how to make the most of it.

If your group chat or work messages start blowing up in the middle of a meeting, you’ll want to know how to silence your Apple Watch quickly. You have a few options: Silent mode controls whether a notification makes a sound. Do Not Disturb controls whether you receive notifications. Theater mode turns off the display.

You can also use a quick shortcut to turn on silent mode in a pinch.

 When you want to work or watch a movie without distractions, turn on Do Not Disturb on your iPhone. A new Apple video shows how to activate this mode. To learn more, visit this detailed guide.

The activation process is simple enough that this Apple Support video mostly serves as a reminder that Do Not Disturb is available.

Sometimes, you need your iPhone and your Mac to be very different tools throughout the day — Focus modes are all about customizing them for everything you do.

Apple’s Focus modes are a powerful way to change how your iPhone, iPad and Mac look and feel whether you’re driving, sleeping, relaxing or working. It’s all about fully immersing yourself in whatever you’re doing. You can change all kinds of things: from who can reach you and which apps send notifications to custom lock screens, home screens and more.

Apple’s new Focus feature is like Do Not Disturb on steroids. It is much smarter than the Do Not Disturb of old. Since not all work or relaxation is created equal, you can set up Focus modes for specific situations to keep unwanted distractions at bay.

When you’re working, you might want email and Slack to come through, unless you’re in a meeting.

When you’re at home, you may want most notifications to come through, but not if you’re having have friends over, playing games or watching a show.

This article will cover setting up Focus modes on iOS 15. If you have the latest iPhone, a brand-new Mac or you’ve kept up with software updates, you’ll want to check out our guide for iOS 16.

If you have an old device and you want to see how Focus modes work, keep reading.

iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 ship with a brand-new feature called Focus mode that lets you set up different notification profiles based on your activities. You can have one for work, one for play, one for sleep, and more.

Here’s how to create and customize new Focus modes on iPhone and iPad.

Do Not Disturb is still available inside iOS and iPadOS 15, despite the introduction of a brand-new and infinitely more powerful Focus mode. But the feature is now missing a key settings option that didn’t carry over from iOS 14.

Users have quickly discovered that Apple’s newest update kills the ability to activate Do Not Disturb only when a device is locked — one of its best features for many iPhone and iPad users.

We want to help you master Control Center, one of the most powerful and underutilized features on Apple devices. Cult of Mac’s Control Center Pro Tips series will show you how to make the most of this useful toolbox on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac.

Heading into an important meeting and need your iPhone to keep quiet? Don’t worry about turning off your device or messing around inside the Settings app; toggle Do Not Disturb mode with one tap in Control Center.

We’ll show you how on all Apple devices.

This is a trick I use almost daily, and until I showed it to a friend yesterday, I didn’t realize that it might not be generally known. Most people know about iOS’ amazing Do Not Disturb mode, which stops users from being pinged by incoming messages and app notifications all the time. But did you know about the great do not disturb shortcuts built into the Control Center?

The Do Not Disturb mode built into iOS is excellent. It hides incoming alerts, and generally stops you from being disturbed by outside forces. But it won’t save you from yourself. What if you accidentally click on a YouTube link or — more likely — that GIF you clicked in Tweetbot turns out to be a noisy video? The sudden racket will surely wake your spouse.

Today we’ll see how to make a shortcut that automatically silences your iPhone whenever it enters Do Not Disturb mode.

One of the most-requested productivity features for iMessage probably won’t be added in an iOS update anytime soon.

A Reddit user recently posted an email exchange he had with Apple VP of software Craig Federighi asking for a scheduled iMessage feature for iPhone and iPad. Federighi revealed that Apple has actually considered and is still considering the feature. However, there are a couple of issues with how scheduled iMessages are received that has caused Apple to hold back on the idea for now.

Read Craig’s explanation of why it hasn’t been added yet:

iOS 12’s best new feature may be Do Not Disturb at Bedtime. That sounds boring, but ask anyone who has been using it and they’ll tell you that it rocks. Apart from being active overnight, the main difference between regular Do Not Disturb and the new “at Bedtime” flavor is that all notifications are hidden from the lock screen until you deliberately swipe up on the screen to reveal them.

Regular Do Not Disturb suppresses audio and vibrating alerts, but the notifications still appear on the lock screen. You’ll see them any time you pick up your iPhone or unlock your iPad. This can make the difference between enjoying your hooky afternoon at the beach in peace or worrying the whole time because you accidentally saw that Slack message from your boss.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the regular Do Not Disturb and make it hide your alerts all day long? The good news is that you totally can.

After months of testing, Apple finally release iOS 12 to the public this morning.

See all the cool new iOS 12 features in the video below.

 Do Not Disturb gets a few great additions in iOS 12. These new features are very simple. However, they will make a big difference in how we use our phones — and how we interact with other people. Let’s take a look at the Do Not Disturb icon on iPhone to understand these changes better.

With iOS 11, Apple introduced a “Do Not Disturb” feature that texts callers to let them know you’re driving or otherwise engaged if they try and phone when you’re busy. But a future version of the technology could perform a more useful feat by texting context-specific responses to the person calling.

In a patent application published today, Apple describes how your iPhone could analyze available information — ranging from fitness tracking apps to your calendar and location information — to figure out the most useful response to a message.

The iPhone’s Do Not Disturb feature really is great. It silences your phone on a daily schedule, so you never need to worry about being woken up by a Facebook alert, or some other useless beep. But maybe you want to be disturbed by certain people. Maybe your teenage kids are out late, or your better half is away on a trip. Is there a way to let their calls and texts punch through the Do Not Disturb shield? Well, yes, there is! It’s called Emergency Bypass, and here’s how to enable it.

Have you ever had your regular (important) iMessages swamped by a flurry of notifications for that inane group conversations about matcha-flavored KitKats? Or maybe you want to keep your iPad’s notifications switched on, but you want to mute iMessages from your boss until Monday, because she has no concept of boundaries?

If so, you need iMessage’s handy conversation-muting feature. It’s so easy to use that you may have turned it on by mistake. If you’re no longer getting alerts for certain messages, you may want to check this, too.

They may be worlds apart, but in many ways, the new Pixel 2 and the iPhone share a lot in common. One of the many features Google borrowed from its rival is a toggle that automatically silences your phone when you’re driving.

Apple has begun promoting new iOS 11 features to iOS 10 users ahead of the update’s public release.

The Tips app is issuing notifications that tease things like iOS 11’s redesigned Control Center, giving users a chance to preview them before the mobile operating system’s release in coming weeks.

Navigating and using features on the Apple Watch is getting a lot faster with watchOS 3, and one of the best additions is the new Control Center that puts a bunch of commands just a swipe away.

Here’s how to make the most of Control Center:

We’ve been using the Do Not Disturb function on our iPhones since iOS 6, really, as the feature really helps us have some down time. You can schedule or enable the feature for easy access, keeping those pesky calls, messages, and notifications off your iPhone screen when you just don’t have the brain space to deal.

But what about those calls and messages you really do need to get? What do you do there? Luckily, there are a couple of options to let certain calls come through.

Pebble has rolled out a new update to its hugely popular smartwatch, finally adding a Do Not Disturb mode, multiple alarms, better performance on iOS, and numerous new features and improvements. 

Back in OS X Mountain Lion, it took a seriously complex shell script and recurring Calendar event to schedule Do Not Disturb times. While it’s fun to dig in and mess about with scripts, I much rather like the new Mavericks beta ability to just, you know, schedule Do Not Disturb using a nice, pretty graphical user interface.

If you’re like me, and you want to schedule your Do Not Disturb times on your Mac (much the same way you can on iOS), then here’s what to do.

OS X Mavericks (named after a hot surfing spot in California) was released last week, and even though it may have been overshadowed by the iOS 7 announcement at the same time, there are bound to be some new things in the operating system we can tip you about.

Remember, though, that as with all beta software, OS X Mavericks isn’t a final version–it’s meant to be used by developers to ensure that when it’s released this fall, all the devs with apps on OS X will have had time to make tweaks to their current Mac software, and start integrating Mavericks stuff into their next bits of software.

That said, let’s take a look at how to enable the new Do Not Disturb toggle in OS X Mavericks beta.

There are a number of tweaks you can install on your jailbroken iOS device that’ll add quick settings toggles to your lock screen, but some of them are far more complicated — and more ugly — than they need to be. LockscreenToggles takes the concept back to basics to ensure it isn’t one of them.