4 steps to improve your ways of working with M365 and Copilot
A summary of the key points from my presentation at Cloud Technology Townhall Tallinn 2024.
In today's fast-paced work life, knowledge workers face many challenges such as information overload, constant interruptions, too many meetings, and lack of focus time. These challenges can lead to reduced productivity, increased stress, and lower innovation. How can you overcome these challenges and improve your ways of working? The change in your ways of working is not only about technology, but also about culture, mindset and skills.
In this blog post, I will share some of the key tips from my presentation at CTTT 2024, where I demonstrated how the digital tools and AI helpers in M365 can help you with managing your workload, improving productivity, and reducing digital chaos. But remember: the tools are only working if you are using them in your work.
Book focus time with Viva Insights
One of the first steps to improve your ways of working is to book focus time for yourself. Focus time is the uninterrupted time that you need to work on your most important and complex tasks, such as writing, designing, coding, or problem-solving.
In M365, booking focus time can be automated with Viva Insights. When you set up the focus plan, it will automatically book time based on your availability and preferences, and block notifications during the focus time. What is left for you to do is to use the booked time to doing those complex tasks that you really need to put your brain in. So close your email, stop glancing your Teams windows, mute your phone and get onto it.
Improve the meeting habits & reduce the number of meetings
Another way to improve your digital ways of working is to reduce the number of meetings that you attend or organize. Meetings can be useful for collaboration, communication, and decision-making, but they can also be time-consuming, draining, and inefficient.
To reduce meetings & improve their quality, you can use the following tips:
Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself if it could be a channel discussion, an email, or a video message instead. Use meetings only for topics that require real-time interaction and feedback.
Share the meeting agenda and roles well before the meeting, and keep the meeting as short as possible. Have breaks during the meeting if it’s longer than 30 minutes.
Avoid having long monologue meetings in the morning, as people will tend to multitask and lose attention.
Use M365 Copilot (or Teams premium) to transcribe and record the meetings, generate meeting notes, and ask for action points.
Digitalize your tasks
A third way to improve your digital ways of working is to digitalize your tasks and use Microsoft To Do, a simple and smart task management app that integrates with Outlook, Teams, Planner, and Loop. Digitalizing your tasks will help you to organize your work, prioritize them, and track the progress. The “bling” you hear every time after marking a task complete is surprisingly rewarding 😁 To Do can also sync your tasks across the devices, so you don’t need to worry about forgetting the task list home or opening it up only on laptop.
To fully benefit from digitalizing your tasks, consider also these ways of working:
Plan your tasks for today in the morning, and mark them as completed during the day. Move the tasks you wasn’t able to complete today to another day.
Use focus time to complete the tasks that require more concentration and creativity.
Use colour categories for the events in your calendar: you’ll get a good overall view of your week’s tasks with one glance.
I’m very much hoping to see a M365 Copilot integration with To Do one day 🤞🏼
Reduce the noise created by too many notifications
One of the challenges of working in a digital environment is the constant flow of notifications that can distract you from your tasks and reduce your focus. Of course you can toggle your Teams notification settings, but again, ways of working act in a bigger role here:
Use tags to @mention. Tags are a way of grouping people in Teams based on a common attribute, such as role, project, or skill within a Team. You can create and assign tags to people in a team, and then use them to @mention the group with one word. For example, you can create a tag called "designers" and assign it to all the people who work on design in your team. Using tags can help you to avoid unnecessary or irrelevant notifications for people who are not part of the tag.
Tell everybody in your organisation about the tags.
Leave teams you don't need. They will invite you back if you are needed.
Conclusion
Adopting the use of the above-mentioned digital tools is only one part of improving your productivity and well-being in the modern workplace. You also need to change your habits and mindset to get the benefit out of the available tools.