Windows 10: How to Permanently Disable Focus Assistant

If it is possible to permanently disable Focus Assistant, I'd love to learn exactly how to do it. And I'm talking "permanent." I'm talking never, under any circumstances will it pop up again. There's probably no way, though. At least that's my suspicion. But here's why I'm suspicious.


It's like Outlook. You'll never stop the spam, fraud, and phishing emails from crapping up your account. They're built into the system. For example, today I think I might have reached my limit for adding to my block list. It's either that or Microsoft has simply changed their system so that we now have to hand-jam every new junk email into our blocked senders' lists or create rules to that effect. I remember when I first complained to Microsoft that their system for reducing this seemingly innocuous but ultimately dangerous nuisance wasn't very intuitive, limited in scope, and because of these reasons seemed to do the opposite. The next day, I kid you not, I had three times the junk mail in my junk folder.


A coincidence?


Here's the kicker: I no longer give my Outlook email to anymore.


I think Microsoft will someday go the way of Facebook. The scandal will be that for many years now, they have been complicit in the defrauding of tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars just in the U.S. via scammers. They're not directly complicit, of course, but when they sell our information to advertisers (who automate all their dispatches), I doubt very much they discriminate. All that's needed is a class action suit from a host of victims, the troubles for whom began when Microsoft made it easy (or simply neglected to make it hard) for scammers to get a foot in the door our lives through email. After that, people will just pile on.


Focus assistant is hardly a comparable problem, I know. But after God knows how many thousands of spam emails, I just want to block everything that takes even a second out of my day, to include having to continuously turn off (but never really turn off) this useless assistant.

:)

 

Permanently disable Focus Assist?

I've noticed the Focus Assist feature for a couple of weeks now and I've always wondered why it keeps enabling itself. It makes me miss potentially important notifications. It looks like Focus Assist enables itself whenever my Thunderbolt 3 docking station
with two external monitors gets connected. I believe Windows thinks I'm going to go in presenting mode, and it'll hide notifications for me.

All good and well, but these are just normal work monitors. I'm not presenting anything.

I've disabled Focus Assist, again, and it will come back when I reconnect my dock... So can I prevent Focus Assist from enabling itself, i.e. permanently disable it?

Alternatively, fix Windows so it knows when I'm *actually* presenting something. But right now, it's too intelligent for its own good, or rather, not intelligent enough. I'd rather not have too much intelligence though, because I have a brain that's most
likely better for the foreseeable future

Besides, most presenting tools tell Windows to withhold notifications anyway, so we don't really need another mechanism.

 

Permanently disable Focus Assist?

Hi,

Thank you for posting your question in the Microsoft Community.

I would like to let you know that Focus assist will automatically turn on when you are duplicating your display and it is by design. Focus assist will also turn on automatically when you are playing a full screen exclusive DirectX game. However, you
can customize this option.

To
turn off this Focus assist option refer to this article.

After configuring Focus Assist, you can choose which notifications you would like to see, and hear so you can stay focused. The rest will go straight to the Action Center where you can see them anytime.

You can choose the times and activities when you don’t want to be disturbed. You may want to disable the option for ‘When I am duplicating my display’ to check if that helps. To

customize Focus assist, refer to the article.

Hope this helps.

Let us know if you got the help you needed by clicking 'Yes' or 'No'.

Regards,

Srimadhwa B

Microsoft Community-Moderator

 

Unable to disable Focus Assist

Hi,

Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.

I do understand how frustrating it could be when the features are not working as they are supposed to work. We would like to know the troubleshooting steps that you have performed so that we can eliminate the recursion of the steps.

However, as you have mentioned that Focus Assist gets re-enabled automatically after disabling it. This issue may be due to a profile corruption. Hence, in order to eliminate possibilities, I would suggest you to create a new user account, disable
Focus Assist and check if the issue persists. Follow the steps from the article
Create a local user or administrator account in Windows 10
to create a new user account.

Hope it helps.

Please reply with the status of the issue, we will be glad to help you further.

Nikhar Khare

Microsoft Community - Moderator