Unlike Mute, Do Not Disturb turns off both sounds and taps on your Apple Watch.
The idea of Do Not Disturb, as the name suggests, is to keep your Apple Watch collecting notifications without actually notifying you. That might sound strange, but if you're asleep, in a meeting, at the movies, or otherwise in a place where you don't want noise or haptics to bother you, but you don't want a list of everything you might have missed in the meantime, Do Not Disturb will do exactly that.
How to set up Do Not Disturb on the Apple Watch App for iPhone
- Launch the Apple Watch app from your iPhone's Home screen.
- Scroll down and tap on General.
- Tap on Do Not Disturb.
- Toggle Mirror iPhone to On.
There are no custom Do Not Disturb settings for the Apple Watch, at least not yet. So if you want to make changes, you'll need to make them for your iPhone as well.
How to manually enable Do Not Disturb on your Apple Watch
- Press the Digital Crown until you get to your watch face.
- Swipe up to bring up Control Center.
- Tap on the Do Not Disturb button.
To turn off Do Not Disturb, repeat the same steps.
Reader comments
How to use Do Not Disturb on your Apple Watch
From what I hear about the tap reminder to stand up during a movie, this tip will come in real handy.
If everyone stands up in 50 min per hour intervals (12:50, 1:50, 2:50, etc...) then u know who has an apple watch lol
i noticed that message notifications will go to the phone only when DND is on. This may be the case for all notifications that are not watch specific. My preference would be for notifications to go to both if I'm wearing the watch and my phone is locked.
I have a question about the Do Not Disturb feature as it relates to Wrist Detection.
I wear my Apple Watch to bed so that I use an Apple Watch sleep tracking app (Sleep Pulse 2). When I go to bed, I tell the Sleep Pulse 2 app that I'm going to sleep and I "turn on" the DND feature on my watch so that I don't get notifications during the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, the DND function does NOT prevent you from being disturbed because when I raise or turn my arm while in bed the main screen of the watch "lights up" because I have Wrist Detection (My Watch/General/Wrist Detection) turned on. This is annoying for me and particularly annoying for my sleep partner, since in a dark room the watch screen display appears very bright.
What I hope would happen is that when you activate DND on the Apple Watch that it would automatically turn off Wrist Detection. That way, when I move or turn my wrist during the night, the screen would NOT light up. If I happen to awake and want to check the time, I assume I could just tap on the screen and it would display.
This is also an issue when you are in a movie theater and you put the watch in DND mode. If you turn your wrist, the watch "lights up"; also very annoying.
Other than turning off Wrist Detection from within the Apple Watch app on the iPhone, do you have any suggestions regarding how to fix this "issue"? If nothing else, Apple should allow you to have a configuration in Wrist Detection allowing the users to enable or not if DND is turned on.
I've also noted that DND does not appear on the Apple Watch app on the iPhone (i.e., below Notifications and Glances). Where did that go?
Thanks...
I 1000% agree!
In WatchOS 3, there is a way to disable "Wrist Raise" from the watch. It would still be better if Wrist Raise display was automatically disabled when you select DND (Do Not Disturb; the 1/4 Mon symbol), to do it manually is fairly easy.
Push Crown, Select Settings icon, Select General, Select Wake Screen, un-select. Useful when in bed, movies, or other settings where the screen lighting up is annoying...
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so if Wake Raise was *automatically* disabled, how can u turn the feature back on later if u cannot look at the display?
By tapping the screen with your finger.
Try this: Place your hand over your watch face. The screen is now blank. Tap the screen and the watch "wakes up". It's magic...