I’ve never found a good way to block out business calls from my iPhone on Holidays. Quite often I’ve just turned my phone off. Apple’s new ‘focus’ mode is very powerful and allows you to stop all incoming calls and notifications, then just let through calls that you want. They don’t appear at all!

Here is my iPhone set to holiday mode. As you can see it is only allowing calls through from 11 people and notifications from zero applications. This means I don’t get any notifications from Mail or text messages or phone or anything. But if the SMS or phone call comes from one of my allowed contacts, it comes though.

Here’s how to set it up:

#1. Go to Settings then focus.

#2. Create a new ‘Focus’ and call it ‘holidays’

#3. Select the people you want to be contacted by.

Select the people you want to be able to contact you. I just selected a few family members. If anyone else rings, the phone will not ring and there will be no notification.

Also all notifications from all apps are disabled unless you enable them!

You may want to enable apps like ‘menulog’ or ‘trip advisor’ for holidays, but I was happy to disable everything.

You can create all kinds of ‘focus’ modes, like work, home, etc.

You can have them automatically turn on and off at certain times.