What is the difference between Do Not Disturb and Focus mode on your iPhone?

Notifications can become very annoying, especially during a meeting or at bedtime. The good news is that your iPhone has plenty of ways to silence and remove them: Do Not Disturb, Focus modes, and of course, classic silent mode.

When silent mode is active, notifications will still appear, but your phone will not make any noise (although it may vibrate). In Do Not Disturb, notifications don’t show up first. And focus modes are like Do Not Disturb on steroids: highly customizable for specific situations, like work or sleep. iOS offers predefined Focus modes and you can create your own.

It should be noted that these features are not new. Do Not Disturb was first introduced with iOS 6 and has just one purpose: to completely turn off all your notifications. You will not see any banners, calls or alerts when activated. This works well when you really don’t want your phone to distract you. But Do Not Disturb may be too strict when you still want to receive important alerts, like calls from family. That’s why Apple introduced Focus with iOS 15.

Do Not Disturb and Focus live in your iPhone’s Control Center, accessible by swiping up from the top right corner of your screen. If you’re still using an iPhone with a Home button, swipe up from the bottom instead. Press the To focus button and you will see all available options presented: classic Do not disturbmore Staff, Work And Sleep. To change a specific mode, press the button three pointsSO Settings.

If you’ve never used Focus before, you’ll need to set it up first. This is what makes this feature so powerful: in its settings (Settings > Focus), you can choose which apps and people are allowed to notify you when a mode is activated. Let’s say in Work Focus you only allow notifications from apps like Slack and Mail, while all others are disabled. The same goes for people; You control whether calls or messages from specific contacts notify you.

To configure them, tap People Or Applications in the options of a Focus. You can choose to Allow Or Silencing notifications from the list you created – whichever one makes the most sense for this Focus. Below Applicationsmake sure to enable Urgent notifications so you always receive important alerts such as reminders, alarms or calendar events. You can also customize a Focus mode by applying Filters And Smart activation. It’s definitely worth taking the time to check out all the options available, given what a great productivity tool Focus is.

As you may notice, Do Not Disturb is its own Focus, which means it’s customizable like the others. You might want to allow alerts from your spouse even in Do Not Disturb, perhaps.

You can manually switch between focus modes Control center at any time, but your iPhone can also trigger them automatically. For example, there is a Sleep Focus that activates at bedtime. It’s based on your sleep schedule in the Health app, meaning there’s no need to manually turn it on every night. Conduct works the same way, as it turns on when your iPhone connects to CarPlay to help reduce distractions on the road.

If Apple Intelligence is activated, there is also the special service Reduce interruptions To focus. This uses AI to determine which notifications may be important and which are not. Because it does all the work for you, it’s a good Focus to try first. If you want to create your own Focus from scratch, tap New direction at the bottom of the Control Center panel, or press the button More (+) button under Settings > Focus. Give your new mode a name and icon, then customize it like the others.

By default, anyone who contacts you via iMessage will see a small notice that your Focus is activated. When a Focus mode is active, some or all notifications will be suppressed depending on how you have configured it. You will still receive these messages, emails and other notifications; you simply won’t get a ping for them. When you want notifications to alert you normally again, turn Focus off.