Embracing Slow Productivity with Copilot and Microsoft 365

Recently, I read the Slow Productivity book from Cal Newport and it truly resonated with me. The book explains how we can achieve more without falling into the pseudo-productivity trap. While reading, I couldn’t help but think about how AI, particularly Copilot and Microsoft 365, is already helping me implement these principles. This article isn’t a detailed review of the book or Copilot but rather my thoughts on how Copilot can help you avoid burnout and achieve more doing less things.

In the book, Cal Newport introduces the Slow Productivity philosophy with three principles to organize knowledge work sustainably:

1. Do fewer things
2. Work at a natural pace
3. Obsess over quality

How Can You Do Fewer Things?

Have you ever asked yourself why you feel guilty if you ignore your inbox for an entire day? Have you thought about how much time you lose every single day going through hundreds of emails that don’t contribute to your work, wasting a big chunk of your 40-hour workweek?

This is just one example of what we can change today with the help of Copilot. Having an AI agent taking care of tedious and non-valuable tasks will leave you with more time to focus on creating valuable work and concentrating on what really matters.

Using Copilot to Spend Less Time Reading and Replying Emails

Instead of spending hours going through each one of your emails, use Copilot to create a daily summary of the important ones that require your immediate attention, complete with a summary, action items, and follow-up. You can use a prompt like this:

Summarize my mails, from today. List action items in a dedicated column. Suggest follow-ups if possible in a dedicated column. The table should look like this: Topic | Summary | Action item | Follow-up.

By doing this, you’ll get a list of important messages to follow-up on without the need to filter important communications from spam messages. This simple action allows you to invest the time saved in decluttering your inbox into replying to emails in a more thoughtful way.

Following email threads is not always easy. Multiple users replying to the same thread in different formats make it difficult to follow and retain all the action items. With Copilot, generating a summary of what is being discussed in an email thread is just one click away directly from your Outlook inbox.

The summary given provides links for direct access to the email conversation, ensuring a quick verification of the details without the need for extensive scrolling.

Copilot takes it a step further by assisting you in drafting replies to your emails. Begin with a simple follow-up prompt, and let it generate the main text for you. You can then adjust it and make any necessary manual edits.

Just as Copilot helps you manage your inbox, you can also use it to stay on top of messages in Microsoft Teams, whether in channels or private chats, by using the following command you can stay on top of all your communications.

Summarize my unread Teams messages. List action items in a dedicated column. Suggest follow-ups if possible in a dedicated column. Identify the location where the message was posted The table should look like this: Topic | Summary | Action item | Follow-up.

Copilot really shines in Microsoft Teams meetings, you can use it as a personal assistant during and after the meeting to make sure you don’t miss any relevant information even if you missed parts of the meeting. Forget about taking notes while in a meeting, do less things and focus on what is being discussed, the meeting notes are being automatically generated for you by Copilot.

In a meeting, Copilot can be utilized to capture essential discussion points, identify who contributed each idea, note areas of agreement or dissent, and recommend tasks to be undertaken, all concurrently with the meeting’s progress.

A few minutes before a meeting is due to end, Copilot will issue a reminder prompt for wrapping up. By opening Copilot, attendees can view a rundown of the main discussion points and identify follow-up actions, like tasks allocated to team members.

After the meeting, Copilot is also available in the meeting's Recap tab and each user can interact with it using their own prompts, here is a list for you to try:

• What questions were asked, answered, and unresolved?
• What was the mood of the meeting??
• Summarize what people said, in a less technical way.?
• Draft an email to the meeting participants that summarized?the meeting and includes the action items.?

How Can You Work at a Natural Pace?

It's really important to find time in your day just for you. When you do, you can get into the zone with your work, without meetings or other stuff pulling your attention away. This isn't just about taking it easy; it's about giving yourself the space to think deeply and come up with great ideas. When you make room for this kind of focused time, you'll see your work improve and you'll feel better, too. It's all about keeping a balance, so you stay sharp and ready for anything.

To protect your schedule and not being always in a rush to the next meeting use Viva Insights, an application included in Microsoft 365 that allows you to protect your time by defining:

• Recurring focus time - Viva Insights will automatically schedule focus time for you every day.
• No-meeting day plans - Insights sends reminders before each no-meeting day to cancel conflicting meetings.
• Lunch hours – Add a recurring calendar event to protect your lunch time
• Create daily breaks - Automatically reserve time every day to take a break.
• Define recurring plan to catch up on messages - Stay on top of messages by automatically scheduling time to catch up on email and chats.
• Define a recurring plan for learning - Prioritize professional development with automatically scheduled learning time.
• Define a virtual commute - Virtual commute helps you celebrate your accomplishments, wrap up today's tasks, and mindfully disconnect from work. You can configure which days and times you want to be reminded to begin finishing up your work and begin your virtual commute.
• Shorten meetings - Rather than scheduling meetings consecutively, allow yourself brief intervals to decompress and reset before your next engagement. Try shortening your meetings by 5 or 10 minutes to make room for a stretch and a water break.

?This ensures you don’t overwork yourself and helps you maintain a steady, sustainable pace.

Obsess Over Quality

With Copilot handling routine tasks, you can focus on producing high-quality work. For example, from Microsoft Word you can ask Copilot to:

Review this document for any errors and suggest improvements.

This allows you to concentrate on the content and quality of your work, knowing that the details are being taken care of.

Conclusion

When not used properly technology can easily become your biggest enemy when you try to be more productive, so my goal with this article is to let you know about the new features being added to the Microsoft productivity suite to help all of us achieving more and getting time back to focus on core and relevant tasks.

In the book, Cal Newport, has a section about spending money on technology to “Go Pro”, and I cannot agree more with him, spending 30 dollars per user per month on Copilot plus the license of Microsoft 365 is not cheap but you need to measure the gains in productivity you get when you use cutting edge tools to do your daily tasks.

Here are some numbers from a recent study made about Microsoft Copilot:

• 70%?of Copilot users said they were more productive, and?68%?said it improved the quality of their work.
• Overall, users were?29%?faster in a series of tasks (searching, writing, and summarizing).
• Users were able to get caught up on a missed meeting nearly?4x?faster.
• 64%?of users said Copilot helps them spend less time processing email.
• 85%?of users said Copilot helps them get to a good first draft faster.
• 75%?of users said Copilot “saves me time by finding whatever I need in my files.”

Now that you know how Copilot and Microsoft 365 can help you with Slow Productivity, I recommend taking a break, enjoying your Summer, and reading Cal Newport’s book. There’s much more in those pages that can change the way you work and live your life.

View Slow Productivity on Amazon

?