How to tune Windows 10 for laser-focused productivity

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Find yourself suddenly having to be more productive? Very good news! Windows 10 comes packed with a variety of tools designed to help you to get Things Done, along with deeper tweaks that may optimize the operating system for productivity even more. Now for the bad news: All those excellent productivity-boosting Windows tools and tweaks aren’t immediately obvious, with some of the most useful settings buried deep in the maze of options menus.

We are able to help. Taking five or ten minutes to tinker with Windows 10 can supercharge your setup, whether or not you’re trying to keep at the job while stuck in the home or setting up something more permanent. Let’s dig in.

Get rid of interruptions
If you want to remain focused on a task, cutting 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 may kick you out of a productive headspace, be it from applications or the OS itself. Let’s eradicate those first.

Open the beginning menu, click on the Settings cog icon, and head to System > Notifications and actions. You have a few different alternatives here. To nuke all notifications from orbit, eradicating them completely, move the Get notifications from applications and other senders item to Off. Boom.

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

If you want to get some notifications-say, Mail and Calendar events-but not others, head back to the main Notifications and actions screen. At the bottom, you’ll see a major list of all the apps that can potentially send you notifications. Slide the types that aren’t critical to off. I love to disable the Razer Synapse and Discord system notifications, for instance, because despite the fact that I’m a gamer they’re prone to interrupting me during work hours. I also avoid Mail notifications, preferring to check on my inbox by myself schedule.

Notifications aren’t even the worst offender in terms of interruptions. There is nothing worse than Windows 10's forced restarts your PC to set up updates. Fortunately, Microsoft’s worked in lots of tools over time that make that scenario significantly less likely to occur-if you understand they exist, that's.

Check out Start > Settings> Update & Security > Windows Update to tinker together with your options. Particularly, check up on your Change Active Hours settings. These enable you to tell Windows when you’re working, and it won’t automatically reset your PC during that time. The opportunity to pause all updates for weekly is handy, too; in the event that you dig into the Advanced options menu you can push them out for just over a month.

Organize your workflow
Instilling some order over your workflow could make a huge difference. Sure, Alt-Tab-bing through all your open programs could work, but taking the time to set up some kind of organization can help keep things running as smoothly as possible. Windows 10 includes several tools that may make multi-tasking a lot more productive.

First off: Multi-monitor setups rock for productivity, and I highly recommend using several monitor if possible. Our guides how to create two monitors and Windows 10’s individual display scaling will help you out if so. In a pinch, you can also use a TV as a computer monitor, though they are better as auxiliary displays. Having said that, not everyone wants (or are able) multiple display, and the Windows 10 tools below help whether or not you’re stuck on a single screen.

Don’t underestimate the energy of Windows Snap, a native way to easily divvy up your monitor into multiple segments specialized in separate apps. Grab an open window by its title bar-the horizontal bar at the very top that says its name-and drag everything the best way to the left or right of the screen, until your mouse cursor touches the edge of the display. You’ll visit a transparent outline flow out from your own cursor to fill half the screen. Let go, and the chosen program will expand, taking on that space. Any other programs open on that monitor will appear on the other half of the screen, and in the event that you select one, it’ll expand to fill that space. Boom! Now you’ve got two programs on the screen simultaneously, split right down the center.

If you’ve got a large monitor, or a pixel-dense 1440p or 4K display, you may use Snap to divide your screen a lot more. Dragging open windows to a corner of your display will Snap them into that quarter of the screen, though like this won’t trigger a prompt asking you what to fill all of those other screen with. You’ll have to Snap the windows you want manually to each corner.

It’s worth it, though. Having, say, a document, a spreadsheet, your work’s chat software, and Outlook open and noticeable all at exactly the same time can help you get yourself a large amount of stuff done faster, especially if you’re transferring data from one of the apps to some other.

Another potent tool for organization: The criminally underutilized Virtual Desktops feature, which debuted in Windows 10. Virtual desktops enable you to separate “virtual” versions of your desktop, each running its instances of software, you could hop between. I home based, so I sometimes run separate virtual desktops specialized in work time and play time, for instance-Office, Slack, and a browser focused on work tasks in a single, and “fun” software like Steam, Discord, and a browser with Reddit or Twitter open in another. When it’s break time (or beer o’ clock), I can just hop to the “play” virtual desktop and grab where I left off.

Alternatively, you could set up multiple virtual desktops, each focused on its complicated work task, with all the current relevant programs, browser tabs, and documents/spreadsheets available to that one project. Your only limit is your imagination!

To start out using virtual desktops, click the Task View icon in Windows 10’s taskbar to summon your Timeline. Select the tiny +New desktop text at the top-left of the screen.

Once you’re create, utilize the same Task View interface to swap among open virtual desktops in the bar that appears at the top of the screen.

You can also use these keyboard shortcuts to regulate your virtual desktops:

Windows+Ctrl+D: Create and open a fresh virtual desktop
Windows+Ctrl+F4: Close the current virtual desktop.
Windows+Ctrl+Left/Right: Switch to the virtual desktop on the left or right.
Windows+Tab: Open Task View/Virtual desktop interface
Source: https://www.pcworld.com

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