Tips & Tricks For Switching Off On Vacation

“Riding” with my friends in London during my vacation

Today is the first working day of 2024 for me, and I’m implementing a strategy I adopted over the last few years whilst at Microsoft. I’m returning on a Friday which most people think is a weird day to start, but actually works great.

Why? I can spend today wading through the backlog of emails, Teams messages and other reminders that needed to be checked over my vacation, and then hit the ground running and fully caught up on the Monday. It works really well for me – I encourage you to give it a go.

The other thing I did differently this time was leverage a custom focus setting on my iPhone to suppress work and non urgent notifications whilst I was on vacation – this turned out to be an absolute game changer for me and enabled me to be more present in the moment without any awareness of work messages.

Focus Setting On iPhone

I have always had an automated ‘sleep mode’ set up on my iPhone that kicks in at 10pm and suppresses all notifications aside from priority family members, but I had never experimented with custom Focus modes and quite frankly did not know what they were. That all changed when I attended EduTechAU in September 2023, specifically the Apple Education Experiences workshop, that was presented by various Apple Learning Coaches. Coby Reynolds ran one on wellbeing with Apple:

some tips and tricks on learning how to use customised focus times on an iPad to support your wellbeing as a teacher.
Coby Reynolds

Heading off on a 3 week adventure in Europe with my eldest daughter, I thought this would be an excellent time to apply this learning and so I created a custom Holiday Focus Mode on my iPhone. I can not overstate how impactful this was and helped me completely switch off from my work commitments and focus on the amazing places we were visiting.

If you want to learn how to set one up, check out this guide:

Set up a Focus on iPhone – Apple Support (AU)

My Holiday Focus Setting & Why It Worked For Me

Everyone is different. People will want different alerts coming through based on their interests and priorities, but for me, I wanted to be able to keep any alerts at an absolute minimum. Here is the overview screen of the new Holiday Focus I made:

The things to note here:

I did not restrict the people that could message me on the approved apps – any of my contacts could still send through an iMessage or Signal alert and I’d receive it. If I had wanted to be even more ‘off the grid’ I could have nominated only specific people’s messages would use a push notification to alert me.
I severely restricted the apps that would alert me (more on that below)
I created a dedicated custom screen that would remind me I was both on holiday but also my phone was in holiday focus mode rather than normal mode when all alerts would be received.

Drilling into the App notifications a bit further, you can see I selected only four apps to allow push notifications to me:

Calendar – hotel/events/flights bookings were all in my calendar and I wanted timely reminders of where I needed to be etc.
iMessage – for communications with family/friends
Reminders – if I quickly recorded a reminder about something I needed to do whilst on the go, I would get a push notification at the time I specified
Signal – my preferred messaging app for secure, encrypted comms and what my family and I primarily communicate on.

There are two settings here that were critical for me:

Show On Lock Screen: OFF. I did not want any alerts from other apps to show on the phones lock screen at any time
Hide Notification Bades: ON. this was the main reason for being able to switch off in my mind. When I use the standard “Do Not Disturb” setting, you still see the badges showing how many unread emails / Teams messages / LinkedIn updates etc etc. It’s those growing numbers of unread messages that I find ‘pull you back’ into work mode and get you out of the holiday mindset. By hiding notification badges on ALL but the specified apps, I had literally no idea what I missing. Of course, I could open my email/Teams and see all of those if I chose, but there was no urgency given I was not having any visual cues alerting me to what work was stacking up in a backlog.
- If there was one tip I would encourage you to try, it is this one.

Given I was usually out all day and with limited access to charging, I set this holiday focus mode to automatically be in low power mode to maximise battery life and reduce the times I’d need to plug my iPhone into a powerbank to give it a quick top up. Given we were using Google Maps to navigate a fair bit, being in low power mode definitely helped preserve battery life!

Lastly, I had my focus status shared across devices. I did take my iPad with me to do some Lightroom editing of photos I took, and so being able to share my holiday focus setting automatically on the iPad meant I was able to preserve the holiday mode mindset no matter which device I was using – brilliant!

So what did it end up looking like? What was the difference?

Compare and Contrast! On the left is my normal focus mode, and on the right is my holiday focus mode. Admittedly, I took these screenshots after I’d cleared the backlog of Teams messages otherwise the screen on the left would have a badge showing all the alerts I needed to catchup on.

On the right, just a single unread iMessage notification badge alerting me to something to check out versus on the right 123 emails, 16 YouTube alert, 19 LinkedIn messages, 9 Lightroom updates and 1 missed FaceTime badge.

I hope this might encourage you to give custom Focus settings a go on your own Apple devices! If you’re already a pro on Apple Focus Modes and know of other recommended tips and tricks please drop a note in the comments below.