The iPhone’s ‘Focus Filters’ Can Help You Ignore Distractions Even Better
Reading Time: 2 minutesWith iOS 16, you can more thoroughly hide emails, messages, and appointments when you’re busy elsewhere.
iPhone’s Focus mode, which is a supercharged version of Do Not Disturb, gains new contextual abilities with the iOS 16 update. Over the last year, the Focus mode has become an integral part of life for users who want to separate work from life, or for specific activities. And now, you can use a new feature called Focus Filters to automatically hide particular messages or emails when a Focus mode is engaged—and you can automate that, as well.
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It works like this—you enable a Focus mode, like Sleep or Workout, and the iPhone can automatically hide messages, emails, Safari tabs, and calendar appointments from your work accounts. Not only will it mute notifications for incoming messages, when you open the apps, it will be like the conversations or messages never existed.
(Note: This is a new feature in the iOS 16 update, which is currently available as a public beta. The wider rollout is expected in the fall.)
Go to Settings > Focus and choose the Focus mode you want to customize. From the Focus Filters section, tap ‘Add Filter.‘ You will see four app filters here:
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- Calendar: Choose a particular calendar to hide all the appointments during the Focus mode.
- Mail: If you use multiple accounts in the Mail app, you can choose to hide individual mail accounts for the duration of a Focus mode.
- Messages: The Messages app can help you filter out messages from everyone except selected contacts. For example, you can use a ‘Home’ Focus to only get messages from friends and family, filtering out work messages.
- Safari: If you use the Tab Groups feature in Safari, you can choose to hide particular Tab Groups when a Focus mode is engaged (this works for shared Tab Groups, as well).
Take some time to customize an App Filter. When you’re done, tap ‘Done,‘ and choose the ‘Add‘ option to add the filter to the Focus mode. You can do this for multiple App Filters across different Focus modes.