Thoughts on iOS 15’s Focus Mode

I have been addicted to solving phone addiction since I had my first smartphone in university when during the final exam weeks, I would ask my roommate to hide my phone till I finish studying.

To this day, keeping my phone out of sight is still the one and most effective way for me to stay focused for a long period of time.

With Screen Time introduced by iOS 12 and now the Focus Mode by iOS 15, tech is trying to solve the problem it created through tech.

But how does it work? Let’s take a closer look at Focus Mode.

What is Focus Mode?

Focus Mode is a more robust version of Do Not Disturb. It now supports different contexts — work, personal, driving or you can really customize anything.

According to Apple’s own article, “Focus lets you stay in the moment when you need to concentrate or step away from your device. You can customize Focus settings and choose when you want to receive alerts and notifications while letting other people and apps know when you’re busy.”

Why do we need Focus Mode?

1. To stay concentrated

Our smartphones receive tons of notifications throughout the day, most of them we don’t need to check or reply to right away.

But the red dots are so intriguing, a funny meme is way more exciting than work, and we just could not resist the urge to see the full comments from social media even if it’s just a “haha”.

Focus Mode can filter out all the irrelevant info so that we can focus.

2. To be present

You can set up any customized focus mode for any activity so that you can go carefree and not worry about missing an important call from someone. In a way, it tries to help us be present at what we do on and off our screen.

3. To make intentional choices

You can create a focus mode for everything — reading, vacation, a night out, etc. And customize what messages you want to receive and even what apps you can still see on your screen during those times.

In a way, it pushes us to make intentional choices on our relationships with our phones within different contexts.

Who is it for?

Remember the last time when you unlocked your phone to do something, the first thing you saw was a social media notification. One minute later, you thought “what did I want to do?”

I personally think this is a great feature that everyone should get onto, given how short our attention span becomes due to the constant bombardment of irrelevant notifications.

As fully promising as Focus Mode itself could be, the first stage — awareness is not ready at all. I have asked around a few friends. Most don’t use it or don’t know what it is for. One uses it for work and sleep. It is really only the already organized adults who are using it or having tried to use it.

I don’t know how we can make more and more people realize the current state of imbalance in the usage of technology and the effect on our brains. Maybe trying some digital detox camps can be a good start.

But leaving that aside, let’s see what Focus Mode can do.

What can you do with Focus Mode?

1. Context-based Focus Modes

If you are the first time explorer of the Focus Mode, there are 4 that came with the system:

• Do Not Disturb
• Personal
• Work
• Sleep

And, add whatever customized focus you want.

So far this looks promising. The one-size-fits-all Do Not Disturb mode now shifts to context-based.

iOS users could be anyone, and there could be an enormous amount of situations — what environment we are in, what we do, how we feel, who we are with, etc. We were a lot more present hanging out with friends 15 years ago than we are today with the black mirror within reach at all times.

Focus mode is one step in the right direction towards helping us become more present in different situations in life.

2. Allowed Notifications

Within each focus mode, you can whitelist contacts and apps you still want to receive notifications from.

After setting up “Allowed Notifications”, you could start your focus mode already. To keep the process simple for users, that’s the right move.

Humans are fundamentally lazy. According to BJ Fogg, “People are generally resistant to teaching and training because it requires effort.” In order for new products or services to truly make an impact as designed, you want to present the user with only a small dose of novelty at a time, then slowly unfold the whole concept.

However, to write this article, I went beyond my encoded laziness. After spending a few afternoons playing around with the Focus Mode, below is a closer look at the further customizations.

3. Share Focus Status

By default, it is on. That means others would see that you have notifications silenced when messaging you.

Ok, this is useful. Remember when you needed to say, “Sorry my phone was on mute”? The phone now says it for you.

It also allows for the other end to send you urgent notifications anyways, which is a feature I first saw in Slack. I found it very useful as the sender can make mindful decisions on whether their message deserves your immediate attention or not.

4. Home screen

By default, both are off. Let’s see what they do when you turn them on.

Hide Notification Badges

When this is turned on, the notification red dots are hidden on all apps.

Pros:

• Hide the enticing red dot
  How many times do we open an app just to clear the red dot knowing that there is nothing interesting we want to see? Now, this feature hides the devil, which deserves a round of applause.

Cons:

• Notifications are shown on the lock screen anyway, which makes hiding the red dots useless.

Custom Pages

When this is turned on, it allows you to customize the unlocked experience to be focussed as well.

Ideally, you first need to design your screens to be purposeful. For example, having a basic apps page, personal apps page, work apps page, then you can choose only to show basic apps and work apps while in Work Focus Mode.

Pros:

• A context-based phone
  You can choose apps you want to see based on context. I think it paints a picture of an ideal future. When it’s 9 am and you arrive at work, your phone only shows work apps. The moment you are home, your phone automatically hides all work apps and now it’s all your social or leisure apps.
• A fully “focussed” experience
  Extend your focus to the unlocked screens. You can pick apps that work the best for your current tasks.

Cons:

• The App Library is just one swipe away
  Especially for work focus mode, people can still access all counter-productivity apps, such as Instagram within one click. The friction is too little to discourage the action. Maybe Screen Time’s Freezing Apps can be used here.

5. Lock screen

By default, both are off. That means the lock screen is bright as default. Although notifications won’t be shown when the screen accidentally lights up, they are just one swipe up away.

Dim Lock Screen

100% a great feature, no cons. In fact, I think the default should be “on”, as opposed to “off”.

When the screen darkens, it is way less appealing to our monkey brains. The same idea is used when you go grayscale on your phone for mindfulness.

Show Silenced Notifications on Lock Screen

The idea behind this feature is that as long as people don’t see a notification, they won’t unlock their phones. Thus, their focus flow won’t be interrupted.

It’s heading in the right direction, but the execution is quite preliminary.

Although the screen appears clean, the notification center is actually just one quick swipe up. Now it feels like a slot machine, more exciting — “Would my swipe up to give me a message or not?!” Science says that our dopamine system is addicted to seeking information, and stimulated by unpredictability. Now the unpredictability makes the reward (notifications) even more intriguing.

Suggestions

I think for most monkey brains out there, it’d be more helpful if the “Notification Center” can be hidden as a whole. So that the lock screen could be straight out dead silent whatsoever.

Frictions discourage the temptation. For example, only after unlocking the phone can you see the “Notification Center”. Furthermore, making unlocking the screen a bit more difficult too, such as “enter passcode” only, no Face ID unlock.

6. Turn on automatically

By default, Focus Mode needs to be turned on manually. There are two ways to set up automation.

Manually enter your rules

You can handpick your preferred Time, Location, or App for when you want which focus mode to turn on. This is great for setting up focus modes for regular daily activities.

It can also be used for certain activities that require high concentration such as reading. For example, by setting up a “Read” Focus Mode to be automatically activated when opening the app Books, we can finally have some peace of mind when reading an ebook on the phone.

Rely on Smart Activation to learn your behavior first

If you are trusting enough to leave it all to machine learning, Smart Activation will do the job. The phone will learn how you turn this focus mode on overtime, probably based on time, location, and app as well.

What could be improved?

1. Simplify the Setup

I have never been an enthusiast in keeping my iOS always up to date. But the moment I heard of Focus Mode, I had to do it. After some attempts at the basic setups, I gave up. It became cumbersome. It looked too powerful in my eyes, or complicated in regular users’ eyes. I went back to leaving the ringer off and having my phone away from my desk. It was only until one day I decided to put down some time to play around it then I figured out all the features mentioned above.

To quote Dieter Bohn from @Verge on Twitter, the new Focus Mode Settings in iOS 15 have gone from “It just works” to “It’s just work”.

But how? That’s for another day.

2. Make the Lock Screen Absolutely Dull

Atomic Habits mentioned that you can rearrange your home to make the undesired habit less accessible and the desired accessible. For example, cannot resist the urge to turn on the TV the moment you get home? Pull the plug and hide the remote away in another room. And have books visible right on the couch. Next time when you get home, thinking of the effort of setting up the TV, your brain will pick the easier thing to do — lying on the couch and reading a book instead.

The lock screen is the first touchpoint that makes the user decide to follow or break their focus mode. By making the lock screen absolutely dull and increasing the effort just a bit higher to unlock. Dim the lock screen by default with Focus Mode. Maybe even allow the user to eliminate the whole “Notification Center” from the lock screen.

3. Bridge Screen Time and Focus Mode

As both features are focussing on digital wellbeing, certain features can be combined or reimagined to maximize on-device intelligence.

For example, Screen Time can freeze certain apps after the time limit, which can be borrowed to Focus Time where you might want to restrict access to certain apps during a focus mode.

4. Allow for Whitelist and Blacklist

From my own friend circle, there are 2 types — one doesn’t use it at all, the other only uses Work Mode. Although that cannot be counted as a legit sample to draw conclusions from at all, I would assume that the early adopters of this feature are the ones who want to be able to focus at work. For them, they use Focus mode to stay focused at work. But after work, they are usually ok with receiving any notifications, except for work messages.

One person said in a Reddit thread, “This is silly since during my ‘personal’ time I’m OK getting texts from everyone; I just don’t want work notifications.”

Allowing both whitelist and blacklist might be one way to work around it.

Focus Mode and Digital Wellbeing

In recent years, we start to see an increase of voices advocating for humane technology and digital wellbeing — our devices’ Screen Time & Focus Mode, Google’s Digital Wellbeing, The Social Dilemma, Humane Tech (Check their Take Control page).

As technologists, we always talk about how to make our products simple and easy to use. But that should not always be the guiding rule. Instead, digital wellbeing should become the fundamental concern where product decisions stem from. That means we might want to make certain features more difficult to access so that we can push people to think and make intentional choices on how they want to spend their next 30 minutes. Then we work on changing people’s behaviors for the good.

Last, I want to end with a quote from E.O. Wilson, a sociobiologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, on the promise and peril of the future:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”