Skip to main content

Windows 10 Makes it Easy to Focus on What Matters

Posted March 2018 by Steve Sinchak

How many times throughout the day are you interrupted by notifications that impact your focus and concentration? Windows 10 has become very chatty over the past few years with notifications from email, apps, Cortana and more popping up at inconvenient moments. Earlier versions of Windows 10 included a feature called Quiet Hours that would mute these notifications.  In the latest update to Windows 10, the feature has been rebranded as Focus Assist and enhanced for more control.

Focus Assist can be turned on/off in the Action Center by clicking on the tile.

Alternatively, you can setup specific triggers that can automatically turn it on/off:

Best of all there is a new “Priority only” feature that allows you to whitelist apps that can break through.  For example, you may want to mute all email notification but allow breaking news.  All of these settings along with toggling the Automatic rules can be adjusted from within the Focus Assist settings screen.

Click on the Start Button, type in Focus assist and hit Enter. Now you can customize Focus assist to function how you want it.

Related Posts


I recently upgraded my home network from gigabit to 10G so I could take advantage of faster transfers between my Synology NAS, Proxmox server, and workstations. But while editing family video clips stored on my NAS, something did not feel right. Every device was connected at 10GbE, but file copy speeds were slower than expected. This made me wonder, are there bottlenecks in my network?

Read More

With remote work the new standard, having a fast and quality Internet connection and WiFi has become as important as reliable electricity. And if you work in IT support, confirming an end user's home internet, internal network, and WiFi is healthy without errors is the first step of troubleshooting any slowness or video conferencing issue with Zoom, Webex or Teams.

Read More

I've written about a few methods over the years to create a bootable USB flash drive from a Windows 10 ISO file.  But recently I switched to using a new tool called Rufus that is both reliable at successfully creating bootable media and automating many steps to quickly get the job done so you can perform a clean install.  This is very helpful when performing a clean install of the [Windows 10 20H2...

Read More

The latest update to Windows 10 known officially as the October 2020 update and 20H2 is ready for use and has begun rolling out.  The final build number of the 20H2 update is 19042 with minor revisions rolling out along with normal security updates via Windows Update. At this time the new build is available to testers before Microsoft pushes it to millions of users in the weeks ahead.  Check out the...

Read More