Putting the focus back in Focus time

When focus time isn’t working and you need to go “private”.

What is focus time

Focus time on your Outlook Calendar is a feature that allows you to reserve dedicated time blocks for uninterrupted or high-priority tasks. This feature helps you manage your schedule by blocking out time in your calendar, marking it as “Busy” to prevent others from scheduling meetings during these periods.

Using focus time helps you protect time. By focusing, it minimizes notifications and distractions, allowing you to give your work the attention it needs. Focus time sessions are not connected like recurring meetings, so each session can be adjusted individually without affecting others. If you cancel Focus time in Viva Insights, the bookings will still be stored in Outlook. They need to be manually deleted to free up the time.

You can set up Focus time in Outlook or in Microsoft Teams.

Focus with Viva Insights – Microsoft Support

To set Focus time in Microsoft Teams, you can use the Viva Insights app. Here’s how you can do it:

Open the Viva Insights app: In Microsoft Teams, click on the Viva Insights app from the left-hand sidebar. If you don’t see it, you can search for it in the app store within Teams and add it.
Schedule Focus time:
- Go to the “Wellbeing” tab within Viva Insights.
- Under the “Act with intention” section, find the “Focus” area.
- Use the arrows to navigate through different days and find a suitable time slot.
- Once you find a time slot, click on “Book” to schedule your Focus time.
Focus Mode: When your scheduled Focus time begins, you will receive a notification in Teams. Clicking on this notification will activate Focus Mode, which minimizes distractions by muting notifications and updating your Teams status to “Focusing.”
Adjust Settings: You can customize your Focus time settings, such as the duration of focus sessions and breaks, by going to the Timer settings within the Viva Insights app.

Note: Chats are muted during focus time. For more information, see Manage notifications in Teams.

Using Power Automate to protect your focus time

Creating a Power Automate Flow is a simple way to make your focus time private. I have found that organizers will schedule over it. When others look at the calendar if they see focus time, they will ignore or book over it. I use this focus time to ensure that my time is protected. So, I can catch up from the other calls or meetings that have happened that day.

The flow is quite simple, as we are getting all the events for the next few weeks, looking for any that contain “Focus time” and then updating to private. Lets look at each of the steps.

Recurrence – This is set to run once a week.

Get Events (V4) – select the calendar (Calendar) where you want to get the events from

Update event (V4) – this is one that we need to use an apply to all, due to the events being fetched, however we also need to put a condition in. The condition is simple as Microsoft uses Focus time as the subject of the events that get scheduled.