I made my Windows lock screen way more useful in 3 easy steps

2025 has been a busy year for Microsoft, with the company tweaking and enhancing its flagship Windows 11 operating system in a number of key areas. Aside from (finally) throwing UI design aficionados a bone with some much-needed dark mode improvements, we’ve also received a revised Start Menu, upgraded battery iconography and percentage visibility options, a convenient drag dray interface for file sharing, and, naturally, a barrage of artifical intelligence tools and features.

One new Windows 11 feature that stands out to me in particular is the freshly-implemented ability to pin widgets directly onto the lock screen, which adds some glanceability to what is otherwise not the most useful interface element out there. Replacing the Windows 8-era “show app updates” feature that very few apps ever tapped into, Microsoft has finally opened the floodgates in allowing full-blown widgets to be added right to the lock screen — a step in the right direction in my opinion.

Working similarly to the “Weather and more” option previously implemented into Windows 11, these new widgets are full-sized and appear centered near the bottom of the lock screen (but above the music player). The big difference is that, as of this latest update, widgets can be manually pinned, arranged, removed, and adjusted as opposed to being locked to the standard set of weather, stocks, search highlights, and sports updates.

As is typical with modern-day Microsoft, all of these aforementioned new Windows 11 features — including the upgraded lock screen widgets experience — are slowly rolling out to users over the course of several months as a quality control measure. With this in mind, you might not see the new configurable widgets option on your PC quite yet, but it should arrive sometime in the coming weeks.

Lock screen widgets are configurable from within Windows 11’s Settings app

To get started with lock screen widgets on your Windows 11 tablet, laptop, or desktop computer, follow these steps:

1. Launch the Settings application.
2. Navigate to Personalization > Lock screen.
3. From here, toggle on the entry labeled Your widgets.

To access the main widgets picker menu, simply tap or click on the Add widget button located next to the Add widgets to your lock screen text label. You can rearrange your widgets by using the gripper handles found to the left of each widget listing, with options to remove or tweak widget settings located within the ellipsis (three-dot) menu on the right-hand side of each widget listing.

Any small-sized widget (full width, but with the minimum length) can be pinned to your lock screen, with four separate and rearrange widgets able to be shown on-screen at a single time. At the time of writing, the following out-of-box widgets can be added to the lock screen right from the get-go:

• Calendar
• Countdown
• Daily Discovery
• Daily Wonder
• Events Near You
• Focus Session
• Phone Link
• Photos
• Sports
• Today’s Moment
• Traffic
• Watchlist
• Weather