How to Use Focus Mode to Get Work Done in Windows

Windows comes with its own productivity-boosting tool—here's how it works.

SPEND ANY TIME alive and you're acceptable to get disconnected with notifications—whether it's admission emails, arrangement updates, new alerts, a pop-up about the abutting clue on your playlist, or all of them together. This battery of distractions makes it arduous to accumulate your breeze and break focused.

Microsoft feels your pain, and it has added a affection alleged Focus in Windows 11. It can be acclimated to abeyance all or some notifications for a set aeon of time, as able-bodied as clue what you get done during that time. You accept how continued these periods are, and you can admission the affection from assorted genitalia of the operating system.

Exactly how Focus works is up to you, but if bare it can actuate Do Not Disturb in Windows, adumbrate notification badges on taskbar icons, stop taskbar icons from flashing, and appearance a timer onscreen. If you accept to accredit Do Not Disturb, you won't see any notifications pop up—they'll all be delivered agilely to the Notification Center.

Once your Focus affair is over, you can accessible up Notification Center (by beat on the time and date in the lower appropriate corner) to see what you missed. While it's not the best adult of productivity-boosting tools, Focus appeals in its artlessness and accessibility, and you may acquisition it becomes a key allotment of your circadian workflow.

How to Use Focus

Do Not Disturb is a big allotment of Focus, so it's account accepting this set up the way you appetite it. Accessible up Settings from the Windows Alpha menu, again bang System, Notifications, and Set antecedence notifications. This lets you specify which apps and contest are important abundant to override the absence Do Not Disturb behavior (where notifications are agilely delivered to the Notification Center in the background).

Further bottomward on the Notifications menu, you're able to adapt the way notifications assignment for alone apps: You can accept some apps not appearance up in the Notification Center either, for example, and you can change the antecedence of app notifications (higher antecedence alerts arise college up in the Notification Center list).

With that done, you can configure Focus. Accessible up Settings from the Windows Alpha menu, again bang Arrangement (on the left) and Focus (on the right). You'll see you can adapt how the approach operates: whether or not Do Not Disturb is enabled while you're focusing, whether or not a timer appears, and so on. You can additionally set the absence continuance for a Focus session.

You'll see that there's a Alpha focus affair button here, which is aloof one of the means to barrage Focus mode. You can additionally admit a affair by aperture up the Notification Center (with a bang on the time and date in the basal appropriate bend of the screen), again allotment Focus. The absence time continuance you defined beforehand will be used, but you can acclimatize this via the buttons abutting to it.

To barrage Focus with the best accessible options, accessible the Windows Clock app from the Alpha menu, again accept Focus sessions from the aeronautics area on the left. Actuality you can set how continued you appetite to focus for, and whether or not you appetite the apparatus to admit approved break (which it will action to do for sessions best than 30 minutes).

On the appropriate is a advance blueprint assuming how abundant time you've spent absorption bygone and today. You can additionally bang the Link your Spotify button to do aloof that—you'll again be able to accept a playlist from Spotify to accompany your Focus sessions. (It can be a relaxing, chill-out playlist, but it doesn't accept to be.)

There's additionally an affiliation with the Tasks app in Windows accessible here. Bang Add a assignment and you can set up one or added jobs that you appetite to get done, which can again be best back you're starting a Focus session. Bang the three dots in the bend of the Tasks console if you appetite to amount in an absolute account of tasks that you've already created.

With all that configured as needed, you can bang Alpha focus affair central the Clock app. No amount how you alpha a Focus session, if you've enabled the timer affection you'll see it appearance up onscreen, either as allotment of the Clock app or in a abstracted amphibian window. You'll see a arresting abeyance button alongside the time, if you charge to footfall abroad from your computer and your Focus affair for a while.

Click the three dots beneath the timer and you can adumbrate the actual time if you acquisition that distracting. Close the timer and the focus affair keeps running—to end a Focus affair afore the defined time elapses, you charge to accessible Notification Center by beat on the date and time (bottom right) and again allotment End session.