Ah wonderful. I misunderstood "focus status" to mean the actual name of your focus was displayed, rather the generic "Evan has notifications silenced" message. Thank you for the clarification!

As to what notifications have been helpful: I ended up making Reading and Listening focuses to make personal stuff like reading and podcasting more enjoyable. Then for work I separated out Communicating (email, slack, asana, collaborative docs) from Coding (everything off) as it seemed those had quite different notification needs.