How I saved more than 14 hours in a month by using Copilot for M365!

Although it may sound like clickbait, it's not. Over the past month, I have been carefully recording my usage of Copilot for M365 at work and analyzing the results. To be honest, I was skeptic of corporate presentations about how much time Copilot could save each month, so I decided to create my own version. After all, we all work differently, and I wanted to know how effective Copilot was for me. It took more time than I expected, but the results are fascinating.

Before I share my findings, I want to give a few more details and explain the methodology I used for this survey:

• This was approximately my fourth month using Copilot for M365, and I had been regularly using Copilot in Bing/ChatGPT for many months before that. While I don't consider myself an expert in prompting, there is definitely a learning curve to understanding which everyday tasks Copilot can be used for and how to properly prompt it.
• I only recorded activities that I knew Copilot for M365 was capable of handling (no wild experimentation), but at the same time, it would not have been possible or safe to use any of the public (free) GPTs.
• This is not a marketing post. I tried to be as realistic as possible and did not give Copilot any slack when recording the events. The intention of the exercise was to get a realistic picture for myself (I decided to post this article on Linkedin only few days ago)
• For every activity with Copilot, I listed three time values: Time Saved (my prediction of the time I would have spent doing the task WITHOUT Copilot); Time Spent (the actual time spent doing the task WITH Copilot); Time Gained (calculated as Time Saved - Time Spent) basically the time I gained (or lost) by using Copilot
• If I was unsuccessful in prompting Copilot, I recorded a negative value for the Time Gained!
• For some activities (in particular for "correcting Email - grammar mistakes and structure") I recorded minimal Time Gained (1min), since I would have sent the Email only by correcting the grammar mistakes, but would not invest the time into rewriting the sentences. I did however recorded that task with the "Improved Result" mark, which means I improved the quality of my work by using Copilot. For a non-native English speaker as myself, Copilot always deliver improved results!
• I was not recording the usage of Copilot if/when I was working during the weekend - It's my fault to have not done the work during the weekday; no need to punish the Copilot for it :)

• I achieved successful results with Copilot in 91.92% of the tasks I attempted.
• I found that in 41.41% of the cases, Copilot provided me with better results than I could have produced myself.
• Results show as Copilot not being effective at searching documents, but reality is we have so many internal tools for searching at Microsoft already which I use regularly, so I was really throwing at him some crazy specific tasks. In reality it is really good at searching stuff
• I am not using the new version of Outlook yet, so I am only using the "Summarize Email" function directly from the Outlook App. I have not adopted the "Compose Email" function yet, even though I tested it and found it to be a massive time saver. I must admit, it still feels like cheating to me. For that reason, I have done all the "Correcting Email" tasks inside the Copilot Chat environment, even though they would belong in the Outlook category.
• Whenever I used the Meeting Recap function in Teams, I tried to be as fair as possible in comparing the time I would have spent listening to the recording of the meeting to the time I spent reading and referring to individual pieces through the recap. To be extra fair, I considered watching the recording at 2x speed, which is definitely not amusing. Example: If the recording of the meeting was 60 minutes long and I have used 10 minutes to Recap the content with Copilot I would have recorded a 20 minutes Time Gain (60/2 - 10 = 20)
• As you can see, there are significant differences in terms of usage per Office application. Lately my everyday work rarely involved using Word to compose new documents or PowerPoint to create presentations from scratch. Therefore, Copilot's usage in those apps is probably misrepresented in this survey period.
• From the data, it appears that the least valuable Copilot is the one in Excel, which is probably not true. However, I must admit that my usage is limited because I have learned enough Excel over the years to do the tasks I need on a daily basis without Copilot. There are also three major limitations to my usage of Copilot in Excel: - It only worked for me with Excel Online until a few days ago when I received the Desktop version- It only works within the scope of an Excel Table- There are limitations on the number of rows it can handle (not usable on 10k+ rows reports I am using at the moment)
• I have though created all the visuals for this article exclusively with Copilot in Excel :)

CONCLUSION:

I was honestly surprised by the 14+ hours of time saved by Copilot, which is nearly two working days! If you have a job where work never gets finished, you can appreciate how valuable this extra time is. The Meeting Recap function has had the biggest impact by far, as I spend a lot of time attending meetings where my active participation is not required. It becomes increasingly valuable when I have two overlapping meetings or am late to the next one, as I can use Copilot live to recap the meeting for me until the moment I join.

Let me know if you found this article useful; please Like/Share so I know it makes sense to invest more time into creating more content. There are definitely much more stuff