Working from home is not everyone's cup of tea especially with the restrictions on movements due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is fairly easy to open social media just to check a notification and then find yourself still scrolling for more memes or reminiscing over old photos half an hour later. As someone who works from home generally, I can tell you that your productivity can easily take a hit due to even a single distraction because of overlapping work and home environments. So, to prevent notifications from knocking your productivity down while working from home, Facebook is now introducing a new feature called "Quiet Mode" that will allow you to mute incoming push notifications for a specified time period.

In its ongoing COVID-19 blog post, Facebook describes the new Quiet Mode as a way to "find the right balance" between work and home so that people use Facebook more judiciously. The Quiet Mode settings is part of the new "Your Time on Facebook" section, which is an evolved version of the "time spent" charts. Here you can see the number of times you open the Facebook app, the duration of your usage per day, and the difference between day and night time usage stacked in a weekly report.

In this dedicated section, You could either toggle Quiet Mode on or off, or schedule it to run between certain hours each day. If you try and open the Facebook app when Quiet Mode is active, you'll be reminded about the remaining time. You can tap on the "Manage Quiet Mode" button and you'll be able to snooze for 15 minutes (like Digital Wellbeing's Focus Mode), turn it off, or change the settings.

facebook quiet mode

In the blog post, Facebook also notes that you'll be able to configure your news feed and notification settings to make the best out of your time on the app.

Facebook's Quiet time feature was first discovered last month by Jane Manchun Wong, who has the reputation of reverse engineering apps and finding hidden or under-development features.