Is there a way to use an ‘exclusion’ based approach to contacts and apps in focus mode?
I really like the promise of the new ‘focus’ options in iOS 15, including the ability to have a number of controls over notifications and customised display of app pages depending on which mode is selected.
For me, the promise of this is less about maintaining ‘focus’ and more on maintaining wellbeing. In the context of the pandemic, I’m trying to use focus modes with time triggers for work hours, after work, sleep and weekends.
Only, this is all reliant on a more ‘exclusion’ approach to the way I choose what can be present (rather than the ‘choose who and what to include’ default framing of how the focus modes are designed).
For me, this means that I simply want to *reduce* the presence of certain things on my device outside work hours: excluding certain contacts, excluding notifications from certain apps, and even excluding a whole app page on my homescreen containing work-related apps.
This currently feels pretty hard to achieve. It’s not like I can bulk select the majority of my contacts to be allowed within a certain focus mode, and the same situation is true for selecting the allowed apps. All of the nuances around the type of notifications that are allowed for specific apps gets very complicated.
Has anyone found a better way to do this? I want it to feel like I’m interacting with a different device during work hours to the one I interact with when not at work. And to do it easily based on simply excluding a few things as I need to. Is this part of the future roadmap of these features for Apple?
iPhone X