Tune Windows 10 for laserfocused productivity

These tips make working from home less distracting—and a lot easier.

- BRAD CHACOS

Find yourself suddenly needing to be more productive in the midst of chaos? Good news! Windows 10 comes loaded with all sorts of tools designed to help you Get Things Done, along with deeper tweaks to optimize the operating system for productivity. Each new major upgrade—like the Windows 10 May 2021 Update (go.pcworld.com/2021), the most recent one—adds more. Now for the bad news: All those excellent productivity-boosting Windows tools and tweaks aren’t immediately obvious, with many of the most useful settings buried deep inside a maze of options menus.

We can help. Taking five or ten minutes to tinker with Windows 10 can supercharge your setup, regardless of whether you’re trying to keep working while stuck at home temporarily or setting up something more permanent. Let’s dig in.

GET RID OF INTERRUPTIONS

If you want to stay focused on a task, reducing your interruptions is key. That can be as simple as checking your email and social media only at designated times, but Windows 10 can still pop up notifications that can kick you out of a productive headspace, be it from apps or the OS itself. Let’s eradicate those first.

Open the Start menu, click the Settings cog icon, and head to System > Notifications & actions. You have a few different options here. To nuke all notifications from orbit, eradicating them completely, move the “Get notifications from apps and other senders” item to Off. Boom.

For a more nuanced approach, you can click the tiny “Focus assist settings” link underneath that option, which allows you to set up rules for when and how you’ll receive OS notifications.