How to Mute Your IPhone or Android During Vacations

Ready to get away for that late-summer vacation and want fewer interruptions from your phone or tablet while you’re gone? Consider setting up a custom Vacation mode that sends most callers to voice mail and mutes notifications from unimportant apps — but still allows calls and messages from specific people to get through, as well as alerts from designated apps. You just have to set up the Vacation mode once, and then turn it on whenever you’re off. Here’s how.

Using Apple Devices

Apple’s Focus feature is meant to help limit distractions on an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, an Apple Watch or a Vision Pro headset so you can, well, focus. Along with the Do Not Disturb setting, which blocks most disruptions with a tap, Focus has other preset modes — or you can make your own.

On an iPhone or iPad, tap the Settings icon, scroll down and select Focus from the menu. On the Focus screen, tap the + button in the upper-right corner and select Custom from the menu. On the next screen, you can give your custom creation a label (like Vacation) and select an icon and color for it. When you tap the Next button at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a list of options you can choose for your new mode. Tap the Customize button to continue.

You can choose a more muted look for your phone’s display and set a schedule to automatically activate your Vacation mode — at a specific time or a location, like your rented beach house. The Vacation mode can be enabled manually in the Control Center or by telling Siri, the phone’s assistant, to turn it on or off.