3 easy tips to improve time management with Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 already offers a great selection of products to empower users to increase their productivity and manage their time, such as Outlook, Teams, OneNote and To Do. Whilst for many users, these tools alone help combat the daily flurry of emails, tasks, and requests that are part and parcel with the digital workspace, power users may benefit even further by taking advantage of simple but effective integrations already available to them today.

Here are 3 easy hacks that I have personally adopted to optimise the Microsoft 365 stack and improve the ways in which I manage and prioritise my workload:

1. Stay organised in Outlook by quickly adding tasks from emails in Microsoft To Do

From there, you can set a due date, add to “My Day” or even drag and drop the task into your calendar to ensure that it is completed on time.

2. Seamlessly capture notes and actions in OneNote that you can tag and manage through Outlook or To Do

To help consolidate tasks and actions when taking notes in OneNote, you can easily tag a task to be actioned in Outlook. Better yet, this is also then added to your Microsoft To Do list.

Note: This functionality is only available in the desktop version of OneNote.

Whether you choose to complete the task in OneNote, To Do or Outlook, it will also be reflected in the other tools to keep things tidy.

3. Utilise Teams Channel email addresses to keep track of conversations and tasks with your team

It is quite common to utilise both Teams and Outlook simultaneously, but there is an easy trick to help improve transparency and share information between the two tools. By including the email address of your Team channel when composing emails, or forwarding past communications to this inbox, Teams will create channel messages including all this content, helping you to keep all the relevant information and tasks in one place and distribute information with colleagues.

This saves you from trawling through your emails when you’re trying to find previous updates or actions, or having to forward information to colleagues via email if you wish to keep the conversation primarily inside Teams!

To find the email address of the Team channel, click on the ellipsis:

Note: Your organisation needs to have the email integration setting enabled for Teams in their tenant for this to be available.

Your email will then appear as part of the Team channel conversation:

These are only three small parts of the Microsoft 365 toolkit which most people will have access to as part of the standard licensing, and which are relevant to most users. Those wishing or needing to take things further, and who would benefit most from advanced process optimisation, should strongly consider investigating Microsoft’s Power Platform service offering; we ourselves regularly use Power Platform to help orchestrate and coordinate our more advanced internal processes.

Interested in learning more about how Intelogy can help you and your team increase their productivity? Please get in touch!

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