Customize Focus Assist on Windows 10 (formerly Quiet Hours)

Customize Focus Assist on Windows 10 (formerly Quiet Hours)

Quiet Hours was first implemented in Windows 8 and worked like Do Not Disturb on other operating systems. Now, the feature received even more options and also a name change being available as Focus Assist. In today’s post, we’ll discuss how you can customize Focus Assist on Windows 10.

Before anything else, it’s worth mentioning Focus Assist hasn’t been rolled out to the stable Windows 10 release channel. At the moment only those enrolled in the Windows Insider program can get it if they install the Windows 10 Insider Build 17083 or a higher build.

How to customize Focus Assist on Windows 10 (formerly Quiet Hours)

If you’re wondering when Focus Assist will become available for the stable Windows 10 release, it will probably be included in the next major update scheduled for the first half of 2018. With that said, here’s how you can customize Focus Assist on Windows 10.

Open the Settings app and navigate to System. In the right pane, click the tab called Focus Assist. The feature has three modes you can choose from: Off, Priority only, and Alarms only.

What Off does is pretty straightforward so lets talk about how the other modes work. Priority only lets you enable Focus Assist while customizing which notifications should appear. The Alarms mode will hide all notifications but will still play alarms.

Focus Assist can be manually enabled and disable from the Action Center. However, let’s see how we can schedule it to turn on automatically.

If you scroll down a bit on the Focus Assist settings page, you will find a section called Automatic rules. Here, you can customize at what times and in what situations Focus Assist (Quiet Hours) should automatically turn on.

As you can see, you can set the feature to be enabled during a specific time interval but also when you’re duplicating your display, playing a game or for devices with built-in GPS, when you get back home.

You might also want to enable the option called “Show me a summary of what I missed while focus assist was on”.

The Action Center allows you to easily enable and disable Focus Assist as needed. It’s setting icon is the crescent moon, just as it was for Quiet Hours.

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