Get More Focused with Shortcuts and Signals for HomeKit

All of us need to get into that laser-focused mode sometimes, and there’s nothing worse than distractions to prevent it from happening. With Signals for HomeKit on the Mac, hitting a simple button on your desk can tell your Apple devices to remove distractions, and adjust your environment to help get you into that zone.

What you’ll need:

• A Mac running Monterey, with Signals for HomeKit installed

• A HomeKit button

• This Shortcut, and a few Apps to help you get focused. This Shortcut includes:

  • Focused Work - A flexible Focus Timer that helps you stay productive, by Michael Tigas

  • Dark Noise - A simple yet powerful way to play ambient noise to help you focus, by Dark Noise, LLC

  • Data Jar - A simple database, designed to be used with Shortcuts, by Simon B. Støvring

The Signal:

Let’s start by creating a Signal to let your family know you’re trying to focus, and to set your office lighting just right. Open Signals for HomeKit on your Mac, and click the ‘New Signal’ button in the toolbar. Click the ‘Customize Effects and Finishes’ button, find the lights you want to flash, and drag them into the ‘Effects’ area - for me, the Foyer lights are right outside my office door, and are perfect for this. To customize what each light does, click the arrow next to ‘Run Effect’, and adjust the effect type, duration and color to whatever suits you.

Flashing lights for a few seconds isn’t enough to let your family know you’re buys for the next 30 minutes, though, so let’s make sure the lights stay red when the flashing effect completes. Drag those same lights into the ‘Finish’ area, click ‘Edit’, and set them to leave the Power on, the Brightness to an appropriate level, and the Color to red.

Don’t forget that lighting can have a significant effect on your own mood. You can add custom Finishes to the lights inside your office to set them to a level that helps you focus as well. My favorite is to turn the light on my desk to a low level, and my ceiling lights to a nice warm color.

The Shortcut:

Download this Shortcut to get you started. This Shortcut does a few things by default, but you can customize it to do whatever you like:

• Prompts you for the task you’re trying to focus on

• Turns on a Focus Mode, to reduce notifications and distractions

• Starts the Focused Work session of your choice, and provides it with the ‘task’ description you entered above

• Plays a noise to focus by, using Dark Noise

• Runs your Signal

• Enables a ‘liveWorkSession’ key in Data Jar — we’ll use this in an upcoming entry to tell if we have an active work session

When you Add this Shortcut to your Mac, you’ll be prompted to select the Focus Mode, Focus Session, White Noise and Signal. This is where you’ll choose the Signal we just created, and any other parameters you want to use for each session, but if you’d like to select some of these parameters each time you run the Shortcut, you can simply leave them as they are. I do this for the Focused Work session, which lets me choose a different option depending on how much time I have available to work. It’s super convenient!

Once configured, be sure to test the Shortcut to make sure it does what you want — if this is the first time you’re running Shortcuts with these 3rd Party apps, it will ask you to grant permission to run them. From here, you can customize it however you need - get creative!

The Automation:

Shortcuts on the Mac gives you several ways to run this Shortcut, and you might be happy just to run it from the Shortcuts app directly, or from the Menu bar, but for me, having the Shortcut run when I press a button on my desk makes it more likely that I’ll remember to run it. It’s also way more satisfying :)

Open Signals for HomeKit again, and click the ‘New Automation’ button from the toolbar. Find the button you want to use to trigger the Shortcut, and click ‘Create Automation’.

On the Automation screen, click ‘Run Shortcut’, and select your new ‘Focus Time’ Shortcut from the list - I highly recommend clicking ‘Test Shortcut’ while you’re here, to make sure Signals for HomeKit has permission to run your Shortcuts.

Next, select the button configuration, and any other settings you want - I’ve selected a Single Press, and I’ve also put a time range on it, so it will only run this Shortcut between 5 AM and 7 PM. This Leaves the button available for me to use for another automation later in the evening.

And you’re done! Give the button a few presses, and then have some fun finding some other unique uses — don’t forget to let us know what you do!

A Note On Buttons:

A quick note on buttons — there are a few HomeKit buttons available on the market, but I’ve found that some of them are not as reliable as you would expect, sometimes requiring a few presses to wake up and register a click in HomeKit. I believe this is because they are almost entirely battery powered, and many of them will go into a sleep mode to preserve battery life — unfortunately, getting them to wake up seems like a challenge, much like my teenagers.

For my money, I highly recommend the Aqara Button — I have one attached to the underside of my desk, so it’s nicely hidden away. The Aqara works properly the first time, every time, and if you already have an Aqara hub, it’s extremely inexpensive. Even if you don’t yet have an Aqara hub, I recommend looking into them — I have their buttons, contact sensors, motion sensors and leak sensors, and their responsiveness and reliability is some of the best I’ve seen for HomeKit. Plus, their hubs are actually functional, adding a security system, camera, etc — not just a useless box that you stuff in a closet. I’ve been very impressed!

Ready to give it a try? Download Signals for HomeKit now!