Insight Calendar Categories

[Frank_Piscitello]

Ok. So, Focus Time shows up on my calendar with the 'Yellow" Category. I see some other color categories being used for "Catch up with email" and such as they are created by Viva.

Is there any documentation on what the official color categories are? How they interact with the calendar and affect your Teams Status. What happens if you change the category to your own?

I did "figure out" that you can change the subject of "Focus Time" to anything else and it doesn't seem to affect the metrics. I've also added secondary categories and that doesn't seem to break things either.

[Jake_Caddes · Accepted solution]

HI @Frank_Piscitello, Categories applied to focus time are not used for insights. They are not used for teams status and do not control any behaviors other than categorizing the block with a certain color. A user can apply their own category to any focus block or any Outlook calendar event as they desire. 

On a separate note we are actually in the process of deprecating automatically applied categories to focus blocks. They have often times led to user confusion. In the future the focus block will be applied without a specific category but the user will still be free to choose the category

[Frank_Piscitello]

That's good to know. (For both points.)

So, there is not a way for a user to manually create a calendar entry and have it "count" as Focus Time for insights (and let Teams take that as a status?)

[Jake_Caddes]

A user can manually create a focus block by visiting the protect time page in the viva insights app. 

The Outlook team is working on bringing the capability to book focus time directly from Outlook later this calendar year.

[Stephenrun]

Using Microsoft® Outlook® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2207 Build 16.0.15427.20182) 64-bit.

The Viva Focus Time previously used 'Green Category' looks to have been deprecated as mentioned above, but deprecated to me would mean not setting any category and being ambiguous to category.

Instead of providing users with the ability to set a category or no category in `insights.viva.office.com` `Protect time`,

It seems that viva now it sets the `focus time` items to null '' a 'no category' effectively removing the category setting and yesterday with the newly created 'no category' focus times I went and set a few to 'Green Category' and removed the alarm (as I like a little colour differentiation between my normal calendar tasks) but come back to my calendar today and they are all reverted to `no category` and alarms re-enabled.

This change hasn't solved anything it's just moved the problem from 'Green Category' to 'no category'.

Why not give users the option which was always the request, enable the flexibility of viva to give us some choice in how it's applied.

[CecilJ]

I agree with Stephenrun on this topic.  I like the visual differentiation on my already packed calendar.  In fact, I would like to set the category and reminder of my choice in Viva for the appt/event type.

[KellyMcD]

I'd like to reiterate what Cecil and Stephen are saying.  It's an important distinction for me to be able to see my focus time at a glance (using color).  Taking it out makes my calendar less readable.  Any plans to add it back?

Thanks,

Kelly

[KimberHM]

Another vote for ability to choose category to automatically apply to Focus blocks. There are several on my team who feel the same. To have that disappear is annoying.

I will note that when we categorize using color, the event setting remains.