I'm trying not to just resist everything new in mac OS right away, but this whole focus concept and do not disturb mode turning on without me asking it to and not having any option to disable it is just too much. I can imagine maybe using this in some exceptional circumstances where it actually occurred to me to do so, but I definitely want it to be a conscious decision.
In the preferences I could find no off switch. I tried setting it to only turn on when I'm in Antarctica and off when I'm not but it didn't seem to actually work as the little moon icon remained there even after this. I also tried to scheduling it to operate in a one minute window but even after that window elapsed it continued to be in 'do not disturb mode'. I don't tend to get a whole lot of notifications nor rely on them much but frankly the idea that they're being suppressed not under direction from me is infuriating and I don't want that to happen.
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).
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?
I've seen this suggested in other forums where people were trying to disable this as well. I don't own any other apple devices except the MBP that this is occuring on. I'm guessing the time of day is in some way a trigger state but can't see any such thing set up anywhere in order for me to turn it off. I now know from this post at least two ways to turn off do not disturb mode which was my primary concern, but I would like to figure out what's triggered it to be on in the first place. Hopefully now that it theoretically should only switch on if I'm in Antarctica it will never turn back on but I'm skeptical somehow.
