If your organisation is using Microsoft Teams, you are probably a member of many chats and teams. Focusing on what’s important has been difficult. There are limited ways to do this, such as pinning favourite chats and channels. Hiding them. Or leaving them.

The new combined chats and channels list offers new ways to organise conversations to suit the way we work. I am a fan of Favourite pinning. I pin channels for my current projects, to quickly. Favourites is your first section, containing your earlier pins.

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With Sections we can group related chats and channels together. If you have switched Create a new section with me now.

Create a new section

In the Chat navigation panel, open the new menu beside New message. Choose New section. Give it a name, for example the name of a current project.

You can add chats, channels to a section. Try dragging and dropping a chat or channel into the section.

You probably have a long list which makes dragging and dropping difficult. Use the … More menu in a Chat or Channel. Choose Show in, and then your newly created section.

Note, you can create new sections while you as you choose to show the item in a section. You can add up to 50 chats and channels to a section, and you can have up to 50 sections.

I think will only use a few sections to group related conversations for focus. I will remove sections when a project or related conversation are no longer in my focus.

How do sections help you focus?

Sections can be collapsed. They also have some helpful features like sorting by recency.

Or customised sort, dragging them into the order that suits you.

Also, take a look at how sections work with filters. Turn on the Unread filter. It filters while showing the chat or channel in the section. Great for focusing on unread related conversations within a section like those related to a project.    

That’s it! We’ve created sections and we’ve learned how to drag items into those sections, so we can focus on things.