How to use Focus mode on iPhone (and actually get something out of it)

What Focus mode is and why it’s worth setting up

Focus arrived with iOS 15 as the grown-up version of Do Not Disturb. Instead of one all-or-nothing switch, you get separate modes for different parts of your day: one for work, one for studying, one for sleep, one for when you’re with people. Each Focus decides who can interrupt you and what your phone shows you.

It’s worth it because every alert has a cost, even if you ignore it. In a Florida State University experiment (Stothart et al., 2015), simply receiving a notification hurt performance on an attention task almost as much as taking a call. And in a study of 221 University of British Columbia students, participants spent one week with phone alerts on and one week with them off: with alerts on, they reported significantly more inattention and restlessness. It’s a student sample and it measured how people felt, not a diagnosis, but it points the same way: fewer interruptions, more attention.

The steps in this guide follow Apple’s iPhone User Guide for the current version of iOS. On an older iOS version, a few labels may differ slightly.

How to set up a Focus on iPhone, step by step

1. Open Settings › Focus. You’ll see the built-in Focus modes (Do Not Disturb, Personal, Work, Sleep…).
2. Tap + in the top-right corner and choose Custom (or one of the suggestions, such as Reading). Give it a name, a colour and an icon.
3. Under People, choose Allow Notifications From and add only the people who might genuinely need you (your partner, your parents, your kids’ school). If it’s easier the other way round, use Silence Notifications From and list who you want quiet.
4. Under Apps, do the same: allow only what you need for that activity (calendar, maps, your banking app for codes) and leave out social media, email and news.
5. Decide what to do with urgent alerts. Time Sensitive Notifications (alerts apps flag as time-critical, like a delivery update or a reminder) can break through a Focus; turn them off if you want total quiet.
6. Tap Add Schedule so it turns on by itself (covered in the next section).
7. Optionally, set up screens and filters (further down). You don’t have to, but it’s what makes the biggest day-to-day difference.

To turn it on manually, swipe down from the top-right corner to open Control Center and tap Focus. Touch and hold a Focus to choose how long it lasts: for 1 hour, until this evening, or until you leave your current location. To turn it off, tap it again, or touch and hold the Focus icon on your Lock Screen.

If you use several Apple devices with the same account, Share Across Devices turns the Focus on everywhere at once (iPad, Mac). If you only want your phone quiet, switch it off.

Schedule a Focus so it turns on automatically

A Focus you have to remember to switch on ends up forgotten. Inside each Focus, Add Schedule gives you three kinds of automation:

• Time: for example, Work on weekdays from 9:00 to 13:00. The most reliable option.
• Location: it turns on when you arrive somewhere (the office, the library, the gym) and off when you leave.
• App: it turns on when you open a specific app. Great with an ebook reader or a meditation app: open it and the rest of your phone goes quiet.

You can add several schedules to the same Focus. A trick that works: schedule it for the stretches where time slips away without you noticing (after lunch, when you get home), not just for work hours.

Focus screens and filters: a different iPhone for each mode

This is the part most people skip, and the one that helps most. Each Focus can change what you see, not just what makes a sound:

• Home Screen: inside the Focus, in the screens section, tap the Home Screen and choose which pages appear. If you build one page with just tools (calendar, notes, maps) and hide the one with Instagram or TikTok, the automatic thumb-to-app habit goes nowhere. For ideas on building that page, see how to make a minimalist iPhone Home Screen.
• Lock Screen: you can link a different Lock Screen to each Focus, such as a plainer one for work. That way you can tell at a glance which Focus is on.
• Focus filters: with Add Filter, some apps show only what’s relevant while the Focus is on: your work calendar in Work, certain conversations in Messages, or a single email account. There are system filters too, like turning on Dark Mode or Low Power Mode.

Three Focus setups you can copy

Work or study

People: close family only. Apps: calendar, notes and your work apps. Home Screen: one page of tools. Schedule: your working hours or study blocks. If you’re a student, how to stop getting distracted by your phone while studying shows how to pair it with timed blocks and breaks.

With people

People: your partner and anyone who might have an emergency. Apps: none, or just maps. Activation: manually from Control Center when you sit down to dinner. It’s the quickest shortcut to stop phubbing without leaving your phone at home.

Evening wind-down

People: your favourites. Apps: music, books and not much else. Home Screen: no social media. Schedule: from 21:00 until bedtime, so the Sleep Focus takes over after that.

What Focus mode doesn’t do (and how to cover it)

Focus silences, it doesn’t block. You can still open Instagram even though its alerts don’t reach you, and if the app is on your Home Screen or you search for it, you’re in. For a lot of people the problem isn’t notifications at all, it’s reaching for the phone out of habit. Other tools cover that:

• Screen Time app limits: a daily cap per app that shows a warning screen when you hit it. The steps are in how to set app limits on iPhone.
• Fewer notifications to begin with: if an app pings you too much in every mode, turn its notifications off altogether. See how to turn off notifications on iPhone.
• Share Focus Status: in Settings › Focus › Focus Status you can let people who message you see that you have notifications silenced (not which Focus you’re using), with an option to notify you anyway if it’s urgent. It stops anyone worrying when you’re slow to reply.