How To Set Up Your iPhone So It Doesn’t Distract You While Reading

Our phones have become increasingly more and more distracting. Reading can easily be derailed with one obnoxious notification popping up. With this quick guide, I’ll walk you through step by step on the myriad of different ways of setting up your phone to distract you the least, so you can get the most out of your reading.

Since starting to use these tools myself, I’ve been able to cut my screen time by 41%.

App Limits

Configuring app limits lets you choose the amount of time to allow yourself with specific apps on a daily basis.

Open the Settings app on your phone
Select Screen Time
Select App Limits
Select Add Limit
Select the categories or apps you want to limit. Your selection can be as broad or as specific as you want

Set the amount of time you want to limit your usage to and how many days a week you want this limit to apply

Downtime

Downtime is a feature on Apple products that allows you to configure specific times to prevent notifications and access to certain apps.

Open the Settings app on your phone
Select Screen Time
Select Downtime

Here you’ll be able to either manually turn downtime on or set up a recurring schedule to automatically turn it on for you

Finally, select Always Allowed and set up which apps are available during Downtime. By default, only Messages, FaceTime and Maps are enabled.

When Downtime is active, disallowed apps will be grayed out and no notifications will show for them.

Focus (Do Not Disturb)

Focus is a feature that allows you to turn off notifications from specific apps for a set amount of time. It doesn’t limit access to any apps, only quiets them.

Open the Settings app on your phone
Select Focus
Here you have a few options. You can either customize the Do Not Disturb option or select the plus(+) button to create a custom one

Next, you can customize which apps can and can’t send you notifications as well as who can and can’t reach you

Finally, you can either create a schedule, have it turn on automatically, or manually turn on focus through the quick access menu

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