So I was playing an old computer game Need for Speed : Carbon on my Windows 10 computer and when I was done playing, I saw a number of notifications in the Windows notification area from Skype that were never displayed to me during the game. The reason for this is a feature in Windows 10 called “Focus Assist”. This feature suppresses all the notifications that appear in your Windows desktop while you are enjoying your full-screen games so that you can enjoy your gaming session without any distractions.
After you have finished playing games, it shows a list of all the notifications with the title – “While you were gaming…”. You can then go through these notification by clicking on the small action center (message) icon in the system tray. But when you are expecting an important phone call over Skype, this Focus Assist could cause a big problem. Imagine trying to explain your boss that you missed his phone call because you were busy playing a computer game and could not see the notification.
This sort of situation can be avoided very easily buy toggling off Focus Assist in Windows 10. In order to toggle it completely off, you can click on the action center icon, then click on Expand to view all the tools, and then you can keep clicking on Focus Assist until it turns grey indication that it is now turned off. The Focus Assist tile will show the status “Off” when it has been turned off.
Focus Assist can also be set to the priority only mode or the alarms only mode using the same method. Priority only mode shows the notifications only from apps that are on a special priority mode. And the alarm only mode displays only alarms. Depending on whether you are expecting notifications from an app like Skype or Whatsapp, you should be able to toggle on or toggle off Focus Assist.