The iPhone’s Focus Mode Is Almost The Perfect Holiday Detox Tool

Two Fridays ago, just before I left for Florida for a week-long vacation, I went through my digital pre-trip routine. I set my Slack status to “Vacation” with a palm tree emoji and paused the notifications until further notice. I’ve turned on Gmail’s auto-responder. I deleted a bunch of apps from my phone that would only distract me from poolside happiness.

The last thing I did was pick up my iPhone and create a new Focus mode. Focus, in case you didn’t know, is a new iOS feature designed to let you quickly switch from one context to another. You can set it to shut down your work apps on the weekend, turn off notifications while you read or sleep, or only alert you to new emails from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and not a moment after. It’s really just an extension of Do Not Disturb, but it gives you more specific control and lets you have different settings for different situations.

My new focus mode was called “Vacation Mode”. The goal was simple: I wanted to make sure that people who needed me could reach me and that I would be warned if someone stole my credit card or burned my house down. Other than that, I wanted my phone to shut up and leave me alone. And ideally, I also wanted it to actively deter me from using it whenever possible.

Unfortunately, Focus’s reality falls far short of this idea. All it really controls are your notifications: you can choose specific people whose calls and messages come through and the specific apps that are allowed to light up your phone. This is a good idea; it’s just too much work. You have to manually scroll through all your contacts and then through all your apps, in alphabetical order, to choose which ones you want to exclude from the Focus block. (The app offers some AI-powered suggestions in the app selector, but I found them to be useless. No, Phone, Vacation Mode doesn’t require calendar notifications.)

This is where I ended up: I allowed calls from “All Contacts” and added Messages, Reminders, WhatsApp, Home, and my banking apps to the list of allowed apps. I also turned off the toggle for “Time Sensitive” notifications because, at least in my experience, there is nothing remotely time sensitive about the “Time Sensitive” notifications I get. I also disabled all notification badges. It wasn’t a perfect setup, but it meant getting all my texts and calls from people I know and being warned about crucial things.

Enabling vacation mode drastically reduced my phone buzzing and lighting up over the course of a week. It was great and I didn’t miss anything I really cared about. But all those notifications Focus Mode blocks? They weren’t gone. They were just grouped together on my lock screen, a small swipe away. And so, every time I picked up my phone, I was bombarded by them anyway. When I picked up my phone to check the weather, it was like being transported back to the office, with all the news alerts and Slack updates and unimportant email alerts – and then, oh great, I just stare at TikTok second for a while.

There is an underlying tension that makes it difficult to get Focus right. Apple is sure it’s less of a problem showing you a lot of things you don’t want than not showing you the only really important thing you needed to see. As a result, the feature is permanently stuck in a place of careful caution. But if Apple really wants to help users regain control of their phones, Focus needs to get a lot more aggressive. In fact, most of the tools to do this already exist! Focus should integrate with Screen Time so that I could say “while I’m in vacation mode, I’m only allowed to use Twitter for five minutes a day” instead of having to change that setting separately. Instead of just hiding notifications, Focus should stop them completely, as if I’d gone to the notifications settings page and turned them off. Focus mode currently lets you hide entire pages from your home screen, but you should be able to hide specific apps or widgets or even rearrange things once you turn on Focus. I don’t just want distractions to be a little hidden on my phone while I’m on vacation – I want them away. All these things should be part of a whole, not separate from each other. And they shouldn’t feel like the Rube Goldberg machine they are today.

Image: Apple

The good news is that it looks like this is where Apple is heading. In iOS 16For example, you can set different lock screens for different Focus modes, and it works to improve both the setup process and the recommendations you get along the way. The new software also allows you to opt out of things instead of signing up, so instead of saying “only these six apps can reach me”, you can say “everything but these six apps can reach me”. That makes it a lot easier to get started with the Focus modes.

However, the real key to the future of Focus is the new Focus Filter API, which gives developers the ability to change their apps in response to settings you’ve enabled or adjusted in Focus modes. Apple’s own apps are a good guide to what that might look like: In iOS 16, I can tweak Vacation Mode to hide my work events in the Calendar app or mute my work email in Mail, but still do things to my personal account. Apple has suggested developers want to use Focus filters to let people hide specific accounts, disable their in-app alerts, or even completely change the app’s layout depending on what a person is doing. . (For example, you can imagine a navigation or music app that would want to look different once you turn on the “Driving” Focus mode.) “Basically, if your app can display different content based on context,” Teja of Apple Kondapalli told developers during a WWDC session in June“Maybe you can use Focus filters to improve the user experience.”

Sounds great, right? Maybe in a year’s time I can turn on Vacation Mode and have my Slack status automatically change, turn on my auto-responder automatically, and all my notifications will disappear except for the ones that really matter. However, there are two problems with this strategy. First, it assumes developers like to build less engaging versions of their app with fewer notifications and badges and prompts to pick up your phone. That will not happen. And two, it still puts all the work in the hands of the users: you have to configure the Focus filters for each app individually.

Ultimately, though, I recommend doing the job of setting up a few Focus modes. I have a few now, including one that turns on automatically when I open the Kindle app so I’m not distracted by notifications when I’m reading. The feature is both not powerful enough and too complicated to use, but it’s a step in the right direction in giving me actual control over my phone. I’m back at work but I’m still in vacation mode and my phone is still mostly silent. And I could keep it that way.