How To Use Do Not Disturb On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use Do Not Disturb on your Mac.

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Do Not Disturb is a way to prevent notifications from appearing on your screen while you're at a meeting, making a presentation, or you just don't want to be disturbed. For instance say you're making a presentation online or at work and this pops up. It would be great if there was a way to avoid that. In addition, any notifications you might get about text messages coming in, about emails, anything that's going to appear on the screen as a notification you can use Do Not Disturb to make sure those don't get displayed. 

There are many ways to turn on Do Not Disturb. In macOS Big Sur the way that is always there is to click on Control Center here at the top. Then you've got Do Not Disturb here. If you click on the little icon it simply turns on Do Not Disturb. Notice that the time is now dimmed. I hear a lot of people asking why is my time kind of grayed out. Well that's because you have Do Not Disturb on. When Do Not Disturb is on it's grayed and when it's turned off it's bright white. Now you can also click here and get more options. So you can turn on Do Not Disturb for just one hour and it will turn off automatically. It's usually the perfect amount of time for an online presentation or a meeting. You can also turn it on until the evening. So at 7:00 pm or until tomorrow. So all the way through the night until 7:00 am. Then you have the option here to put it always on. No matter which one of these you choose you can cancel it at any time. So if I turn it on for an hour but I really only want it on for half an hour I could always return here and turn it off. Or simply click here and it will turn it off. So anyone of these options can be canceled pretty easily.

Now there are many other ways to turn on Do Not Disturb. One way is to hold the Option key on your keyboard and click on the time. That just turns it On. You have to use the Option key and click again to turn it Off. Be careful when using that though because it's easy to leave it on. I find it's much better to actually turn it on just for an hour or until this evening to make sure, if I forget to turn it off, it will go off automatically eventually.

You can also drag and drop from Control Center to add more Menu Bar items. So I can drag and drop this right here and now I have this little crescent moon in the Menu Bar. Now I can turn On and Off Do Not Disturb by clicking here and have the same options. I can turn it on, say, for an hour. Now notice when it's On the icon is bright white. But when it's Off the icon is dimmed. Once you're using that the time here will no longer change. It will be this icon that changes instead although in the opposite way. So if you don't like the idea of having your time dimmed when Do Not Disturb is on you can always add the little icon here and use that instead. 

Now you may be wondering if there are other options. Can you have it turned on for 30 minutes or for 2 hours or until the end of a weekend or something. The answer is NO. There is really not. There's just those options there. So for anything else just turn it to Always On and then remember to turn it off. You can always set a reminder to turn it off.

You can also set a keyboard shortcut. If you go into System Preferences and then to Keyboard and then Shortcuts click on Mission Control here on the left. There's turn Do Not Disturb On or Off. You can set a keyboard shortcut for that. Make sure it's checked and then you can click in here and assign any keyboard shortcut you want. I've got Option Shift Command D. You can see I can use that and it will turn Do Not Disturb On and Off. You also, of course, just ask Siri. Turn on Do Not Disturb. Okay, I turned on Do Not Disturb. 

There are also several settings for Do Not Disturb in System Preferences. To get to them go to Notifications. The top item here is Do Not Disturb. Now you can set Do Not Disturb to automatically turn on at a certain time of day, like say 10:00 pm and then turn off again in the morning. That's really useful for quieting your Mac at night. You may want to set this even earlier, like 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock at the end of your workday. You also have Do Not Disturb on whenever the display is asleep. So for a MacBook if you simply close the lid you're not going to hear those notifications. You can also set it to when the screen is locked. So for an iMac or a MacBook that you don't really close the lid you can use that one instead. Then you can have it automatically turn on when mirroring to TVs and projectors. So if you're making presentations at work all the time having this on will automatically turn on Do Not Disturb when you're presenting on a big screen. 

Now there are some options of what happens when Do Not Disturb is On. One of the things you can do is Allow Calls. So now FaceTime calls coming into your Mac will be allowed. You probably don't want this if you're doing in-person or online meetings all the time. But if you're using Do Not Disturb just to get more work done so you don't see all those notifications appearing you may want to allow calls to come in even though notifications aren't. Also, Allow Repeated Calls means that if somebody tries to call you twice within three minutes the call will go through. If you get a lot of spam calls or calls that usually aren't that important this will stop the notifications for all of those. But then if somebody wants to get in touch with you in an emergency if they call you twice it will come through.

A few things to note. Remember that even if you have the time is set here or using one of these other options to automatically have Do Not Disturb go on, you can always turn it off manually. So if you're working late on a particular evening you can turn off Do Not Disturb even though you have this checked. Also note that you're still going to get notifications. You're just not going to see them appear on your screen and they're not going to make any sound. You can always go into Notification Center and then you'll see them appear here at the top. So it is just not going to bother you with them but you can still check manually to see what notifications have come in.