Posey's Tips & Tricks

How Viva Insights Become Less Effective (and What to Do About It)

Many organizations embrace focus time through tools like Viva Insights, but without clear policies and boundaries, the practice often collapses under the weight of repeated "emergencies."

• By Brien Posey
• 07/30/2025

In recent years, organizations have increasingly been embracing the concept of focus time, as a way of helping employees to have a chance to get their work done without interruption. Tools such as Microsoft's Viva Insights make it easy for users to schedule uninterrupted time during which distracting notifications are muted. Based on my own observations however, organizations almost always abandon their efforts to provide employees with focus time or quiet time, even if the organization initially embraces the idea.

So why is the concept of focus time seemingly doomed to failure? Here is how the situation plays out…

Initially, an organization might be fully onboard with allowing users to schedule a few hours of focus time each day. After all, employees who are able to focus on their work without having to deal with countless interruptions and distractions are inevitably going to be more productive and will consistently produce better quality work.

The problem is that sooner or later, an emergency will occur. This emergency might involve a critical system outage, a dissatisfied client who is ready to take their business elsewhere, a looming deadline or something else altogether. In any case, the event is a legitimate emergency that demands nothing short of an all hands on deck effort. In such a situation, the concept of focus time is disregarded because it's more important to deal with the critical situation that the organization is facing.

The problem is that because the organization's leadership has agreed to override focus time "just this once," it sets a precedent that makes it OK to override focus time any time that a crisis arises. Over time, even minor issues start being treated as urgent. This is known as the slippery slope of urgency inflation, and when it takes hold, the entire concept of focus time slowly becomes meaningless because focus time can be interrupted by any perceived "emergency."

There are a few different reasons why this erosion of boundaries occurs. For starters, there is often a lack of any clear definition as to what truly constitutes an emergency. A situation that might look like an emergency to one employee may be nothing more than a meaningless distraction to another.

Another problem is that interrupting focus time right now delivers immediate results because employees drop whatever it is that they are working on and collectively focus on the situation at hand. The problem with this is of course that the employee's day to day work will almost certainly suffer as a result. Perhaps an even bigger problem is the potential for long term burnout due to constant "emergencies."

Finally, another reason why an initial emergency almost always eventually leads to focus time going away forever is because when an organization chooses to override focus time, they typically have no structured plan in place for protecting the concept of focus time later on. When focus time becomes a preference rather than a policy, it will always take a back seat to other matters that are deemed to be more important.

This of course raises the question of what an organization can do to protect its employee's focus time. First, as previously noted, make focus time a matter of policy. As an example, an organization might create a policy stating that all employees are entitled to three hours of focus time per day.  Such a policy might state for example, that there are to be no meetings from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM on any given day. This reserved block of time cannot be treated as optional. It has to be something that all employees (including management) adhere to. Otherwise it will not work over the long term.

Another step in protecting the concept of focus time is to formalize the concept of recovery focus time. Suppose for a moment that a legitimate emergency were to occur and that management has no choice but to temporarily suspend employee focus time. Rather than treating the lost focus time as simply being gone, make it a policy to reschedule the focus time to occur sometime in the next day or two. This should be in addition to any focus time that is already scheduled for that time.

Finally, and this is the important one, leadership absolutely must define what truly constitutes an emergency that is worthy of interrupting focus time. Some organizations for example, have created a tier system for categorizing adverse situations. As an example, Tier 1 might represent a severe situation that demands immediate attention (such as a major service outage). Tier 2 might consist of a situation that needs to be handled today, but isn't so severe that it can't wait for an hour or two. Tier 3 might be something that is more routine and can be scheduled. Following along with this example, focus time should only be interrupted for a Tier 1 emergency.

The bottom line is that the entire concept of focus time can quickly erode if left unprotected. The only way that an organization can sustain focus time over the long term is by taking action to protect focus time, even when doing so becomes inconvenient.