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You should just be able to go into Focus Status and disable it. That will stop the Mac from being able to trigger Focus no matter what. If you really want to neuter it completely, you can delete any Focus modes you see there too.
As for Do Not Disturb, it is usually mirrored from other devices too, so maybe you turned on DND on your phone or triggered a focus mode from there or something?
You can very easily turn it off with the control center (swipe down from top right of screen) toggle. You can also set certain apps/people to be able to contact you even when on. You basically have complete control of everything.
I completely forgot I had the whole control centre thing, thank you. I used High Sierra way up until late last year and can't help operating Sonoma as if it was still High Sierra. The control centre method did work, and I also discovered from a help link that I had misread an earlier help article and in fact if you option click the date it will also disable it (I had it in my head I needed to option click the do not disturb icon).
The automatic turning on is definitely a setting you would need to have turned on.
Do you have multiple Apple devices? You might have set them to mirror each other so they all share the same focus mode.
You might have created a shortcut that is attached to an automation to turn it on based on some trigger, (time, place) etc.
Or in the focus mode settings you can click on do not disturb and it should list how it is set up.
On the do not disturb settings page under focus, near the bottom is “on a schedule”.
You can have a time schedule, as well as a smart activation, where it tries to learn when to do it automatically.
For instance gaming focus has learned to turn on when o play a game for like 5 minutes.
If you turn those off and ensure you don’t have an automation in the shortcuts app that turns it on, you should be at only manual control.
I've kinda dealt with this before. I also find it crazy you can't just turn Focus off with a switch. What I learned was that embracing Focus helped me.
Go into the Focus settings. Turn off Share and Focus Status. Then just add yourself a preset with no people or apps silenced (unless you want some), turn smart activation off (or don't if you want to use it), and you can now set that Focus.
You can take this a few steps further. For example I have 3 settings. One for a loud phone that I don't miss calls or notifications on, a quiet phone for when I don't need the alerts to be so loud, and a sleep mode where the only notifications I get are calls from family. I made shortcut buttons (the Shortcuts App is kinda powerful) for each mode using a widget on my home screen, and now I can switch to any one I want whenever. You can also long hold your lock screen, and edit your Wallpaper (background appearance and widgets on the lock screen). This setting can be linked to each Focus mode you've made. So you can easily link your phone's appearance to a mode so you know when they've changed.
But you can turn it off with a switch, unless I’m missing something? Isn’t the control center toggle exactly what you want?
I'm not so sure. When I look at that menu, I only see the options for a Focus.
Upon another check, yes. If you go to that menu, and press the selected Focus, it turns off. I guess I never tried that.
I'm really confused. Focus mode doesn't just turn itself on or off for you. It's something you have to either activate or schedule. Third party apps can also activate it, I believe, with permission. It also synchronizes across devices, so if it's turned on on your phone it will turn on on your Mac.
You seem to be having some issue that isn't related to the default behavior or I'm not understanding what you're asking (my bad if so).
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-a-focus-on-or-off-mchl999b7c1a/mac
Unfortunately... it can. Which I can say on the basis that, it did. There were no schedules or filters set in the settings for do not disturb and I don't know of any other way to deliberately cause it to activate. If there's more settings somewhere perhaps there some additional sets of rules and logic that would explain why this happened, but even if so, they never had any personal involvement from me.
In any case though, I had found the article you linked already while googling but in my frustration I must not have read very attentively because I misread the option clicking method of setting or disabling the focus state, and was option clicking on the moon icon instead rather than the time and date. Clicking where I should have worked, as did the suggestion from another user to use the switch in the control centre. The strange thing is that after trying both of these methods successfully, the far more intuitive and obvious method that I tried right from the start unsuccessfully, now started working. Prior to disabling via option click, and also through control centre, if I clicked on the crescent moon icon I would be presented with a list of focus states, of which my system seems to have only the one, 'do not disturb', while I could find no off switch it did seem that the most obvious form of toggle was likely to be clicking on the 'do not disturb' text since that was apparently the mode that it was in and it stood to reason that would likely toggle it off, except, it didn't do anything hence my utter confusion. Now it just works as you'd expect and I now have 3 ways to turn it on and off. The fact that that button just didn't work is about as explicable as why the focus state tripped in the first place through no actions of my own when you say it isn't supposed to do that.