Win+Home: minimize everything except the window you're working in

You're writing an important document and chaos flickers around it: mail, chat, three browser windows, a spreadsheet. The well-known Win+D shortcut clears the whole desktop — but it also hides the one window you're actually working in. This is exactly what Win+Home is for: it minimizes every window except the active one. All that's left is your work, and quiet.

How to do it

1. Click into the window you want to keep and press Win + Home — every other window minimizes to the taskbar in a single instant.
2. Press Win + Home again and the minimized windows return exactly where they were — so it's a temporary tidy-up, not a destruction of your layout.
3. You can achieve the same trick with the mouse: grab a window by its title bar and quickly shake it side to side — the other windows drop to the taskbar; shake again and they come back.
4. In Windows 11, shaking is off by default: turn it on in Settings → System → Multitasking under the title bar window shake option. In Windows 10 it works out of the box.

A typical scenario

You have to finish a message for leadership before the end of the hour. But Teams, Outlook, and six browser tabs are all lit up on screen — and every blink in your peripheral vision pulls your eyes away from the sentence you're writing. Win+Home: only the document remains. You write. When you need to look something up, the same shortcut brings the windows back — all in their places, nothing to reopen or rearrange.

The student version: while writing a term paper, only the editor stays on screen while sources wait minimized — zero distraction in sight, everything ready on the taskbar. And because the second press restores windows to exactly their original layout, you also skip the usual tax of tidying up: the five minutes of rearranging windows back to the state where you were working comfortably.

What you get out of it

• Focus without closing anything: distracting windows disappear from view but don't disappear entirely — you return to them with one press once you're done.
• Speed over manual clicking: minimizing eight windows one at a time means eight precise clicks on a small button; here it's one shortcut.
• A complement to Win+D, not a replacement: Win+D clears straight to the desktop — useful, say, when you need to find something on the desktop; Win+Home instead clears around your unfinished work and leaves that one important thing right in front of you.

Pro tip

If windows distract you on a regular basis — every morning while writing, every Friday during a report — a more systematic solution is worth considering: virtual desktops permanently separate work and communication windows, so Win+Home then only needs to handle the occasional emergency.