You actually can find out if the Do Not Disturb is currently enabled or disabled. Notification Center drops a plist in the following location that you can read the value of. Run the following to find the plist file: ls ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.notificationcenterui.*.plist Now, you can read the value from the plist you just found by using: defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.notificationcenterui.8D3EA20D-8D7F-52E2-9F99-BC17A13A3F0E.plist NOTE: your actual filename may be different than what I have listed above. You will see a key called "doNotDisturb" and it will either have a value of 1 or 0 (enabled or disabled) You can also change it's status by doing: defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.notificationcenterui.8D3EA20D-8D7F-52E2-9F99-BC17A13A3F0E.plist doNotDisturb 1 or: defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.notificationcenterui.8D3EA20D-8D7F-52E2-9F99-BC17A13A3F0E.plist doNotDisturb 0 I've actually written a very simple Automator script so now I can enable/disable the Do Not Disturb for Notification Center with a keyboard shortcut. Very handy. :)