How to Enable and Use Focus Sessions in Windows 11

Windows 11 brought a few exciting changes. Surprisingly, many of these changes are aimed at increasing our productivity levels, whether it’s the center-aligned Taskbar or the handy gestures. Another new productivity-focused change is Focus Sessions. As the name suggests, this simple feature is designed to increase your productivity by helping you focus on the task at hand.

It’s easy to set up and the best part is that you can also play music from Spotify while performing the task at hand. And yes, you can define tasks too. Sounds interesting, right?

In this article, we will see how to enable and use Focus Session to increase your productivity.

Let’s go, shall we?

What Are Windows 11 Focus Sessions?

As mentioned earlier, the Focus Session is designed to help you focus more on the task at hand. Its function is similar to the Time Block mechanism, where you block a certain amount of time in your day for a specific task.

While previously Windows users had to rely on third-party apps or Chrome extensions, this time users like us can access it directly from the Clock app itself.

Naturally, you will need to log in to access all features. However, it is not mandatory. Focus Sessions integrates Microsoft To-Do and Spotify for now.

With Focus Sessions you can view your daily progress and series. Dashes are the number of times you successfully completed a session. You can also set a daily goal for yourself. For now, Microsoft has set a 1 hour target.

Focus Sessions can be found under the Clock app. Simply open the start menu and search for Clock.

How to Start a Task

If this is your first time accessing Focus Sessions, you may need to sign in before the app can receive your tasks from Microsoft To-Do.

When you’re done, all you have to do is tap the Start Focus session button and start the timer. Focus Sessions comes with the option to add a break in between. By default, the break is five minutes and you can change this in Settings (more on that later).

Stage 1: To start the task, hover over the Task and click the Select for Session button.

step 2: Change the timer according to your needs and start the session. This much.

When the timer is complete (or you stop it manually), the duration of that task will be displayed. And well, that’s a big plus. This way, it helps you measure the time it takes you to complete (or partially complete) a task so you can more easily calculate the time required for future sessions.

Note once again that linking Microsoft To-Do is not mandatory. If you just want to take time for yourself while working on a task, you can add a new standalone Task. To do this, click on the three-dot button as shown in the screenshot below and add the details.

Manage Notifications and Remove Distractions

However, if you are constantly distracted by a series of notifications, no clock or timer can help you be productive.

To mute notifications, click Settings on the left panel and select Change your notification settings.

This action will open Windows Notification and Focus Assist.

While the notification shows a larger image, you can actually customize your entire system’s notification settings using Focus Assist. You can set automatic rules based on time. Or you can choose the names of allowed apps.

Again, it’s important to note that Focus Assist will not start automatically when you start a Focus Session. It just opens the door for better notification management.

The idea is to tailor it accordingly so you have minimal distractions while working.

Customize Focus Sessions Settings

Although not much, you can customize some settings of Focus Sessions according to your preference.

For example, you can define the default Focus time and Break period through Settings.

Apart from that, there are other minor changes like changing session tones.

If you prefer to listen to music from their smartphones, you can remove the Spotify tile here.

Keeping Clock Ticks

For now, Focus Sessions provides a good way to Time Block locally. It allows you to add standalone tasks and pull tasks directly from Microsoft To-Do. And Spotify Integration sounds interesting too.

However, you will need to eliminate all unnecessary distractions to focus on the task at hand. At the same time, configure both Focus Assist and Focus Sessions. Hopefully, Microsoft will add a native way to toggle notifications soon.