How to prevent Outlook and other programs from stealing focus

Imagine being deeply focused on a very important and time-sensitive task and, all of a sudden, an incoming email throws you off by jumping into focus. I am sure you don't need to imagine too hard as this has likely annoyed you in the recent past too, right?

Here is a guide to help you make sure that no piece of software has the ability to "jump to the top" and activate your cursor on it, letting you carry on working on that important task without taking your focus away.

Problem

So, what did I run into, again? Let's see!

Here's a bit of context...

After a recent batch of Windows updates, my Outlook desktop client started stealing focus whenever a new email hit my inbox. Like most people, I get a lot of emails, and after a while my patience completely ran out when Outlook kept jumping into focus, stealing my keystrokes, and actioning whatever those keystrokes were bound to do in Outlook.

Whether or not broken updates should be pushed to end-users is an entirely different story, but let's not go there right now.

Why and when does stealing focus happen?

Any time Outlook shows a notification for new mail, the window would also steal focus. Having already disabled practically all of the notifications from the Windows 10 Notification Center, this should not have been the case. However, the issue still persisted despite this.

After Googling did not yield any decent solutions, the best advice that I found was to disable all Outlook add-ins, but even that did not resolve the issue.

I did not find a suitable solution for Outlook alone, but luckily I found a way to disable all applications from having the ability to steal focus altogether. In my opinion, this is a definite win as no application should ever be able to jump to focus anyway.

Here is the workaround that I used.

Solution

This solution is outlined in this conversation. To stop the issue, we need to set the registry key for Foreground Lock Timeout to 0, effectively stopping that timeout from ever expiring. Below are the steps with a few screenshots to guide you through the process.

How to prevent Outlook and other programs from stealing focus

Time needed: 5 minutes.

1. Open regedit (win+r, write regedit, or just search for "regedit" in Start Menu).

2. Export your registry in order to make a backup before making any changes.

3. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Control Panel > Desktop.

4. Edit ForegroundLockTimeout (see below) to "0" instead of whatever value is stated.

   
   Regedit before changes stopping Outlook from stealing focus.

   
   Regedit after changes stopping Outlook from stealing focus.

And that's it! You can enjoy doing that task without any more annoying Outlook notifications stealing focus.