With the release of Apple Intelligence, we gain a new Focus mode for iPhone and iPad that offers a more personalised way to control notifications throughout the day. By turning on the new Reduce Interruptions Focus mode, your iPhone will automatically prioritise notifications, showing you only those that are important or time-sensitive and allowing other alerts to wait until later.

This differs from the previous Focus modes, which relied on general time-sensitive alerts that would let almost any marked notification through, regardless of its content. Using Apple Intelligence, this new Focus mode analyses each notification individually to decide if it’s essential for you to see in the moment.

Of course, you can still customise this Focus mode to allow notifications from specific people and apps to come through. Let’s go into the Settings app, tap on Focus, and select the Reduce Interruptions Focus I’ve just enabled. Here, I can choose which apps and people I’d like to allow. As a quick example, I’m going to let notifications from YouTube Studio come through, although I’d probably avoid this in real life!

And because it’s a Focus mode, we can link it to a schedule based on time or location. By tapping Location, I can choose to enable this Focus mode whenever I arrive at work, and it will automatically switch off when I leave. This setup means I’ll avoid non-essential notifications while at work, but still receive anything truly important that might require my immediate attention.

Now that everything is set up, if I lock my iPhone, you’ll see Reduce Interruptions at the bottom of the lock screen, with the Apple Intelligence icon beside it. From this point on, only essential notifications will alert me, but I can still check Notification Centre to see everything else I’ve missed.