Why the Date and Time In Your Mac Menu Bar Is Gray

If the date and time in the top right corner of your Mac's screen is gray or dimmed, it is because you are using Do Not Disturb or some other Focus mode. Learn how to turn it off if you have turned it on accidentally, and find out how you can keep the date and time as black text when a Focus mode is on.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Is the date and or the time at the top right corner of your Mac dimmed or gray?  Let me show you why.
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Now one of the most common questions asked online by Mac users is why is the date and time at the top right corner of the screen dimmed or gray. There's actually a good reason for this. It's not a bug. 
So here you can see the date and time at the time right hand corner of my screen look perfectly normal. But if you don't see it like that, instead see it like this, you may be wondering why. The date and time are dimmed or gray here and they are actually kind of hard to read. The question is what causes this and is there a way to turn it off so the date and time is always there as regular black text. Now you may think the way to turn this off is to go into System Preferences and go to the section that has to do with the Date & Time. That's in Dock & Menu Bar and then if you scroll down you'll find Clock. This is where you control exactly what appears here. You can have the Day of the Week shown. You can have the Date shown or not. A.M., P.M. All of that. This is where you customize what's in the Menu Bar there for Date & Time. 
But there's no mention here of it ever being grayed or dimmed. That's because what actually is being indicated here when it's gray or dimmed is that either Do Not Disturb or a Focus Mode is turned on. So let's go into System Preferences and then Notifications & Focus and then to Focus. Now, previous to macOS Monterey there was only one Focus mode. It was called Do Not Disturb. That's all you had. Either Do Not Disturb was On or Off. If Do Not Disturb was turned On then the Date & Time here were dimmed. If it was Off then they were black. So you had an indicator on the screen telling you whether or not you were using Do Not Disturb. 
Now you can have multiple Do Not Disturb modes. You've got the Default and you can add your own. So you've got Gaming, Evening mode, and Coding Mode right here and whenever any of these are turned On this is gray. The easy way to turn them On and Off is to actually go into Control Center here. Go to Do Not Disturb and this is where you can select one or if one if already selected you can turn it Off. You can see I've turned it Off and now it is black. If I select one of these other modes like Coding you can see its gray. 
However there are a lot of other ways to turn Do Not Disturb or Focus Mode On and Off. Some of them you may not even realize you're using. For instance, you can hold the Option key down and click on the Date & Time and that will turn on Do Not Disturb or turn it Off. So Option click again will turn it Off and now you can see this is black text there. It's easy to do that accidentally. Also if you look at these modes here you can see there are different ways to trigger these. For instance, Coding will go On when Xcode is launched. So maybe you have a mode that's been set to go On when you launch an app. Evening here is set to go On at a certain time. Gaming is set to go On whenever you connect a wireless controller. So there are various other ways to have these turned On automatically. You may have even set one to work on your iPhone and not realize that with iCloud it's going to sync across all your devices and if Do Not Disturb is On your iPhone it's going to be on for your Mac as well. So it's really easy to get Do Not Disturb or one of the Focus Modes On and have this gray.
If it is not your intention to have one of these Focus Modes turned On now you know how you can easily turn it Off using Control Center and then get your Date & Time back to normal. However, if you want to use Do Not Disturb or one of the Focus Modes but don't want the Date & Time to be dimmed there is a way you can change that. The Menu Bar wants to have at least one way to indicate to you that Do Not Disturb or Focus Modes is turned On. So give it another way. If you go into Dock & Menu Bar and you look here on the left there is a Focus. Here you can see I've got Show In Menu Bar turned Off. Let me turn it On. Now you can see this little crescent moon here that's gray here in the Menu Bar. This indicates that Focus Modes are turned Off. That's why it is gray. Kind of the opposite to Date & Time. When this is gray that means Focus Modes are turned Off. Now if I were to click here you could see I have the same controls that I have here in Control Center under Focus. It's exactly the same! I just have easier access to them when they are here and this indicator. So, if I go here and turn one On now notice that the gray its black. The Date & Time are not affected. The Menu Bar is satisfied that it could indicate the Focus Mode with this icon and it doesn't change the Date & Time. If I go in here and I switch to something like Gaming notice how the icon changes to match the icon I've chosen in System Preferences for this Mode. So I see a little rocket ship there. It's black so it is On. The Date & Time are not affected. If I were to turn Date & Time Off you can see I go back to the gray crescent moon there. 
So all you need to do is have this in the Menu Bar and your Date & Time will no longer be the indicator for a Focus Mode being On. You can also add the indicator using just the Control Center here. Go to Focus but instead of clicking just click and drag and you could drag into position here and do it without ever going to System Preferences. If you ever want to get rid of it hold the Command key down and drag down until you see the x and release. 
So if you're using macOS Monterey you have this ability to turn Off the Date & Time indicator for Focus Mode by simply adding Focus Mode as an icon in the Menu Bar. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “Why the Date and Time In Your Mac Menu Bar Is Gray”

Jonas

2 years ago

Thank you so much! It was always hard to read the time and I was very confused why Apple would make it so hard to read – what's going on? You made it very clear to me and gave me a solution. Now I can have a Focus mode and still be able to read the time :D Thank you for your help!!

Pascal

Very good explanation. Exhaustive and short. Thanks!

Thank you so much for this! It was driving me crazy for months!

Amy Ling

Thank you so much for this! I didn't notice that it was dimmed until recently and it's been bothering me. It seems to only be dimmed when I have it connected to both my external monitors. Turning off do not disturb, share focus status and share across devices helped.

SolC

Thank you so much! Was driving crazy in dark mode, now true happiness has come!

Johnny

Thank you so much, problem solved! I didn't even know I had a focus mode on. I even updated my macbook, cause I thought it was some bug lol.

Nathan

Nicely done. I recently tried to remove some of the clutter in my menu bar (gotta avoid that notch) and because I'm using Dark Mode, Apple decided I didn't need to be able to see what the date/time was without cranking up the brightness or squinting.

I just love the arcane reasoning they used: "Well, the user needs an indicator in their menu that a focus mode is enabled, so if they remove it, we'll dim the date/time, because that's totally intuitive."

Fix the bug for Dark Mode please. :D

Comments Closed.

Why the Date and Time In Your Mac Menu Bar Is Gray

Comments: 7 Responses to “Why the Date and Time In Your Mac Menu Bar Is Gray”

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