How to Set Up Focus on a Mac for Work

Set up a mode of your own in System Settings → Focus — the built-in Work or a new one via Add Focus…. Under Allowed Notifications, keep a short list of people and apps and add a schedule; the mode silences everything else, and notifications wait for you in Notification Center.

Notifications break your work more often than anything else: a banner in the corner, a message chime, a red badge on an icon. The first idea is to turn on Do Not Disturb for the whole day. But then you miss what you can’t afford to miss, and a day later you switch the mode off for good.

You need a work mode of your own: it lets a short list of important things through and silences everything else.

Everything else is detail.

Where it lives

Open System Settings → Focus. The built-in modes are already there — Do Not Disturb, Work, Personal, Sleep — and Add Focus… creates a new one. For work, take the built-in Work mode or make your own with a clear name.

Silenced notifications don’t disappear: they pile up in Notification Center and wait for you. To turn a mode on by hand, use Control Center in the menu bar — you can pick a duration there too, such as one hour.

The mode is half of a quiet workspace. The other half is not opening apps just to check on things: the next meeting or the time left in a pomodoro is visible on desktop widgets.

Who gets through

Inside a mode there’s an Allowed Notifications section with People and Apps. Each has two approaches:

Allow Some Apps (for people, Allow Some People) — an allowlist: only the ones you pick get through, the rest stay quiet;
Silence Some Apps (for people, Silence Some People) — a blocklist: only the ones you pick stay quiet.

For work, use the allowlist and keep it short: two or three people and a couple of apps — your calendar, the on-call channel. Every allowed app is a hole in the silence. A blocklist is handy when only a few apps are noisy, but anything new gets through by default.

Two more switches:

Allow time sensitive notifications — lets through notifications an app has marked as time sensitive, such as a meeting reminder. The app does the marking, and in System Settings → Notifications you can turn time sensitive notifications off for any app.
Allow repeated calls — if someone calls a second time within three minutes, the call isn’t silenced. A good safety net for real emergencies.

When it turns on

Add Schedule… offers three options:

time — start, end and days of the week;
location — the mode turns on when you arrive at a place and off when you leave;
app — the mode turns on when you open an app and off when you close it or switch to another app.

An example for a working day: Work on weekdays from 10 to 13 — the hours when people look for you least. An app-based schedule is less useful than it looks: switch from your editor to the browser to check the docs, and the mode is already off.

Among the options there’s also Smart Activation: the mode turns on when the system itself decides the moment is right. Handy if your day is unpredictable, but the system decides for you. Start with an explicit schedule and try Smart Activation only if the schedule isn’t enough.

Focus filters

Further down in the mode’s settings are Focus Filters. Add Filter… opens two sections: App Filters and System Filters.

On a Mac, app filters exist for Calendar, Mail, Messages and Safari. Two examples that pay off right away:

Calendar — show only work calendars while the work mode is on;
Safari — open a work Tab Group so personal tabs stay out of sight.

System Filters change the Mac’s own settings while the mode is on; the list after Add Filter… shows which ones are available.

Status and other devices

Focus status. When a mode is on, apps you allow can tell people that you have notifications silenced. The most visible example is Messages: the other person sees a note and, if it’s urgent, can notify you anyway — then the message gets through. Apps never learn which mode you have on. You can share the status for selected modes only.

Share across devices. A switch on the main Focus page. When it’s on, your modes are shared across all devices signed in to the same Apple Account, and a mode you turn on on your Mac turns on on your iPhone too. The upside: one setup for everything. The downside: your iPhone goes quiet along with the Mac, even when you’ve stepped away from the desk. You can switch it off, but then this Mac stops sharing your Focus status.

To keep banners from popping up while you share your screen, there’s a separate setting, and it lives not in Focus but in System Settings → Notifications: it allows notifications “when mirroring or sharing the display”. Turn it off, and on a call or a projector your messages won’t end up in front of everyone. You don’t need a Focus mode for this.

Common mistakes

A mode for the whole day. Being silent for an hour or two is fine when people know an answer is coming. Being silent until evening isn’t, and the mode ends up switched off for good. You want windows of quiet, not a deaf day.
Too many exceptions. If ten apps are allowed, the mode silences nothing. Once a month, open the list and cross things out.
The forgotten iPhone. With Share across devices on, a mode your Mac turns on by schedule silences your phone too. Expecting an important call? Check that switch.

Notifications aren’t the only thing that derails work: a colleague at your desk or a “quick question” in chat is handled by agreement, not by a setting. More on that in distractions and interruptions.

In the app

Pomodoro can turn the mode you choose on for a pomodoro and off for the break. macOS has no public way to do this, so the app runs two of your shortcuts from the Shortcuts app with the Set Focus action: one turns the mode on, the other turns it off.

In Settings → Focus Mode, turn on Turn on a Focus mode during focus sessions and pick both shortcuts. The mode is on only while a pomodoro is running; on pause, on a break, and when you skip, reset or quit the app, it turns off. The app only turns off a mode it turned on itself. If a shortcut fails, settings show “Shortcut “…” failed.” All of this needs the app to be running and macOS 15 or later.

The app doesn’t set up schedules, filters or allowed lists: you build the mode as described above, and Pomodoro just turns it on and off.

Mode ready? The next step is to build the two shortcuts and connect them to the timer, step by step in Pomodoro and Focus mode on macOS.