Get things done with focus sessions in Windows 11 - pomodoro style 🍅

Hi welcome to my series on how to start loving Windows 11 now that it's time for Windows 10 to say bye 👋🏻. Until 14th of October I will explore Windows 11 features and functionality.

Table of content 💖

What are focus sessions and what's the purpose?

How do I use it?

My thoughts

In the fifth blog post in my series on how to fall in love with Windows 11 I want to talk about how to use focus sessions. And how you can get things done with focus sessions in Windows 11 - pomodoro style.

What are focus sessions and what's the purpose?

Have you ever had issues with getting things done, one million different tasks and ideas just flowing around making it hard to prioritize? You are not the first. During the 80s a method called Pomodoro was developed with the aim of managing your time by focus on one task for a specific time and pausing with intervals. If you want to read more -> READ ME.

Where does Windows 11 come in? Well there online tools, there are your alarm on your phone, there are even pomodoro clocks (from which the name of the method comes) and now we have it built in Windows 11.

By giving ourselves a shorter time to focus it makes it easier to stay focused and slowly finishing our tasks - because hey multitasking is not the way to go.

What does focus sessions actually do? It does a set of things:

• It gives us a time that gives a clear indication for how long to focus.

  
  

• It pauses notifications, banners and alerts making it easy to focus and easy to avoid distractions.

  
  

• We can link our Spotify account to give us music.

  
  

• We can link it with a To Do tasks list to help us knowing where to focus.

How do I use it? Get things done with focus sessions in Windows 11 - pomodoro style!

You reach focus sessions in the clock app (yes there is a clock app) under focus sessions.

Before we get started we need to make the relevant adjustments based on our needs:

• How long should I focus for? This decides for how long the focus session should be and when the alarm should ring for "you are done focusing".

  
  

• Should I get any breaks? Do we need a break during our focus session?

  
  

• Do I want to connect it with my Spotify account? This will play music for you while focusing, this feels more fun as you can play music anyway during the session.

  
  

• Do I want to connect it with a list in Microsoft To Do? Connected to your To Do lists to give the focus session a clear focus, you can also add new tasks her if you want.

  
  

• I can add a daily focusing goal (if you're that kind of person who get of by a competition). Will give you a streak a la Snapchat.

  
  

When you are done with all the settings it's time to focus. My favorite is to pop out the timer so that I can see how much time has past and how long I have left. When the time is done an alarm will get of and you can close tasks from To Do and feel happy because you did something🤜🏻🤛🏻!

Final thoughts

This is a tool that I need to help me focus, I love how it helps me stay intentional with my time, especially when I’m juggling a million things. But having no time to focus wont be fixed by this, and this is why I recommend combining it with focus time in Viva Insights to create a new way of working where you plan for work to get done.

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Others posts in my Windows 11 series:

Why you as an end-user should want Windows 11 right now 💗

How to get started with Microsoft Recall as an end-user

How to move your Windows 11 start menu from the center to the left

How to use the built-in snipping tool in Windows 11 - no need for third-party tools!