Introduced in iOS 16, Focus Filters are excellent in premise. If you’re in say, a Work focus, you can block out distracting apps, websites, and notifications. It even works in Messages, where you’ll only see texts from people in your Work focus.
There’s one caveat with its implementation in Messages though, and it makes it much less useful for me than it could be.
Personally, I often find myself getting sidetracked in great conversations while working on my Mac. Initially, I tried just closing the Messages app and removing it from my dock – but then I just found myself pickup up my phone constantly to check texts. So then, I tried focus filters.
For the most part, it’s an effective solution. I can select a couple people I’d like to be able to quickly chat with, but cut out everything else that might not necessarily be important. It’s not just a matter of notifications. In the Messages app, it removes all of the excluded people from the conversation list.
I only have 4 people in my Work focus, and only one of them is someone I talk to on a frequent basis – with the rest being people that I’d still want to see in the event that they do need to text me.
This has worked really well, though there is still one big issue: if a person in your focus filter is in a group chat, the entire group chat is included in your Messages app. Unfortunately, this has meant that I’ve had to exclude some people from my Work focus that I’d otherwise like to have.
The feature certainly has a lot of potential, though I would like to see Apple put a little more care into it. There should be more granularity around group chats, and maybe even some integration with Screen Time to build a more encompassing digital mindfulness suite of tools. Hopefully iOS 27 changes a thing or two.
How do you feel about Focus and Focus Filters as they exist today? Let us know in the comments.
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