I love my new Google Pixel 3, but with the ringtone and vibration, it’s active all the time. Is there a super fast way I can enable Do Not Disturb when I’m heading into meetings or similar?
Modern phones have so darn many options that an incoming text message can trigger an audio sequence, buzzy vibrations and flashing lights from your camera flash. It’s a lot! If you’re in a meeting or just having a conversation with friends, it can be too much, and I’m sure your colleagues and friends appreciate your desire to mute things a bit! 🙂
One solution is to turn off your ringer and have your Google Pixel 3 or other smartphone set to vibrate only (which is much less annoying to others) but the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL have a really cool new feature that’s not only perfect for what you seek but hopefully something other phones will adopt too: Flip to Shh.
Yeah, I know, not the greatest name for the feature, but descriptive!
Let’s work our way there, tho, so I can show you a couple of other ways you can set up Do Not Disturb. The fastest on a regular Android – and iPhone, actually – is to pull down the shortcuts pane from the top edge. On Android, you see this:
A single tap on “Do not disturb” on the top right and your phone will stop bothering you until you turn off the feature. Easy enough, right?
But what if there are set times that you’d like to have Do not disturb enabled too? You can set that up on your Android phone easily from within the Settings screen. Tap to launch Settings then search for “do not disturb” to quickly jump here:
There are some other settings of import here, but focus on the very last entry: “Turn on automatically”. Notice that I already have one rule set up. Tap on the phrase “Turn on automatically” and you’ll get to a more detailed page with options. The one you want to enable is “Sleeping”:
Here’s where you can set up, say, 10pm to 7am every day of the week, or let yourself sleep later on weekends with two rules, etc. Easy and definitely a really good thing to set if you don’t want your drunken mates waking you up at 2am to invite you down to the pub!
But you’re on a Pixel 3, so let’s see the latest feature! Search for “shh” on the main Settings screen:
You can see it shows up as a match: “Flip to Shhh”. Tap on it and you can see what it does and enable it both:
Enable that and you’ve just got the coolest feature that your friends and colleagues will envy: simply place your phone screen down on a surface and it’s automatically in Do Not Disturb mode until you flip it back over. Want to not go into that mode? Simply lay it down screen-up and everything will behave as normal.
Very cool feature that you’ll quickly grow to appreciate. Nice going, #teampixel
Pro Tip: We have lots of Android tutorials on the site, please do check ’em out while you’re here.
This is a great feature. If you do not have a Pixel 3 and you want to do this on your Android Phone, you can use the app Locale. It does lots of great things, but this is one of my favorites.