I get a lot of questions about the Do Not Disturb feature on the iPhone.
A lot of people like the idea of your phone being quiet at night and not bothering you
with notifications.
But they're worried that they're going to miss something important.
An important phone call or text message from someone they care about or from work when
it's important.
That kind of thing.
Well, there are ways to make sure that certain people can get through to you even with Do
Not Disturb turned on.
So let's take a look at it.
First of all the easiest way to turn on Do Not Disturb manually is to bring up Control
Center.
When you bring up Control Center you just tap the little crescent moon there.
But, for the most part, Do Not Disturb is used automatically.
So you go into Settings and under Do Not Disturb you have the scheduled portion there.
The default will be something like 11:00 pm to 7:00 am.
You can change the default to anytime you want.
So set it to your bedtime and your awake time.
Also, when you turn on Do Not Disturb manually either through the Control Center or through
here, it basically turns it on from now till the end of the day, through the scheduled
period, and it turns it off automatically.
So if you're going to bed early one night you can turn it on and know that it's going
to go off at the regular time.
Now what happens if you turn it on and somebody needs to get through to you.
Well, there's a bunch of different ways they can get through to you.
One way is they can just simply be signed as a favorite contact.
So you can see here it says Allow Calls From.
If you go in there you can set it to Everyone, which is useful because it still silences
all the notifications and text messages.
But you'll still get phone calls.
So you're like me and you rarely receive phone calls anyway you may want to use that one.
If somebody tries to call you it will come through.
You can set it to No One or you can set it to just Favorites.
You can also set it to a group.
You can't assign groups on the iPhone but you can do it on your Mac and then it syncs
through iCloud.
So you can set a work group or an emergency contacts group, or something like that, and
then just say I want that group to be able to call me.
How do you assign a Favorite?
Well, the way you do that is you go into Contacts, you select a person, and then at the bottom
it says Add toFavorites.
Then you select what type of favorite to add.
Now the only one that Do Not Disturb cares about is for Calling.
So you want to turn Calling on.
Then if you go into the phone app, and you tap on Favorites, the little star at the bottom
left, you can see all of your Favorites listed.
This is useful anyway just to be able to quickly call them.
But you can also Delete them here as well so you can get rid of Favorites.
Another way to do this is to use the Emergency Bypass.
Emergency Bypass is really cool.
You go into Contacts here and, just like before, you select a contact.
Now you won't find Emergency Bypass anywhere here.
Even if you go to Edit you won't find it.
But if you tap on the Ringtone, so there's the Ringtone and the Text Tone.
I'm going to tap on Ringtone.
You can see in addition to be able to set a custom ringtone for this person I can also
turn on Emergency Bypass.
That means their phone calls will come through even if I have Do Not Disturb turned on.
Better than that, you can also do the same thing here for their Text Tone.
So now their text messages will come through normally even when Do Not Disturb is turned
on.
This is really handy because you can do it per contact.
So you do the contacts that are important or maybe just, in one particular case, like
during a meeting or one particular night, you want to make sure that somebody can get
in touch with you.
Maybe somebody is arriving on a plane that night and you want to make sure they can call
you but you want to have Do Not Disturb turned on for the rest of it.
You can basically enable them to text you, enable them to call you and then just remember
to turn that off later on.
So you can do that as kind of a temporary measure to let people through or permanent
if it's somebody very important to you that you want to make sure Do Not Disturb does
not apply to them for either phone calls or text messages.
Now also notice that there's another way for people to get through to you.
If you go back into the Do Not Disturb settings in your Settings app you'll see there's a
setting for repeated calls.
When you turn that on a second call from that same person within three minutes will still
get through.
So if somebody really wants to get through to you they're going to try called twice and
it gets through to you even with Do Not Disturb turned on.
You can let people know that this function is on, on your iPhone.
So just tell them hey, if you ever really need to get in touch with me if it's an emergency
call me.
If I don't pickup and it's like in the middle of the night or whatever, just call me again
immediately and the second time I'll actually get the call.
So there's various ways for you to bypass Do Not Disturb when it's important.