Learning how to create a Focus shortcut on the iPhone home screen can help you suppress distractions with just one click.
Apple’s Shortcuts tool gives the ability to create home screen icons that can activate and toggle certain functions that generally don’t appear on our home screen.
Setting up shortcuts can turn what is often a two or three step process, into one easy button.
How to create the shortcut
Our first step will be to open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone.
Once here you will create a new Shortcut with the + icon on the top right.
Once in the editing mode, type “set focus” in the “search actions” bar on the bottom.
Choose “set focus” with the moon icon. Then a bar with three blue boxed options appears.
These boxes contain the words:
- Turn
- Do Not Disturb
- Off
This is where we can fine tune the shortcut.
In order to turn the focus on and off, we will select the Toggle option. This means the shortcut can be used to turn the focus on AND off. Using the Turn option instead would make the shortcut only capable of turning the focus on, or off, and not both.
Once we choose Toggle, the box with the word “on” will go away, since using the toggle option does not need this button.
In the second box, which says Do Not Disturb, you can choose the focus you want to set.
In this example we are using Do Not Disturb, but any focus can be set here.
Renaming the shortcut and adding it to the home screen.
Once the initial setup is complete, we need to do a few more things to make it useable.
First you will want to rename it. Do this by clicking on the circled grey arrow pointing down from the top.
Next you will choose the “Add to Home Screen” option. This creates a button on your home screen. This button will have the same look that other applications have.
This menu also allows you to choose a photo from your camera roll to replace the colored icon.
Once added you can move it to the desired location on your home screen. This icon will not display whether or not the focus is toggled on or off, but a notification will pop up and tell you when it is pressed.
To edit the shortcut after it is already made, press the three dots at the top right of it within the shortcuts app.
For more information on how the shortcuts app works, check out Apple’s Shortcuts user guide.
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