Harnessing productivity apps for efficient work
As the days grow longer and the sun shines in the sky, it’s natural to want to spend more time outside enjoying the long summer evenings. Balancing work activities can sometimes be challenging, but with the right tools and strategies, and using the newest technologies, you can make the most of your time and be confident in finishing ahead of time so at soon as that clock hits the end of your workday, you can be out of your seat and into the sunshine.
Here at Geeks, we’re always looking for new technology releases to see which applications and software we can use to better serve our customers and streamline our workday, so we’ve compiled a list of our favourite features in various productivity apps:
Using Outlook calendar effectively
One of the key features of Outlook calendar is its ability to help you manage your time efficiently. For example, through time blocking; by implementing time blocking, you can allocate specific blocks of time for focused work and create a structured schedule.
You can begin by identifying your most productive hours and blocking them off for your most important tasks. This can help you to avoid distractions during these time slots to maximise your productivity and ensure you have more free time to enjoy summer evenings!
Shortening meetings
Do you ever find that your meetings run longer than needed? Long drawn-out meetings can often hinder productivity and eat into precious time.
Outlook includes a useful feature that allows you to transform your meetings to be slightly shorter, so if you set up a 30-minute meeting, this is changed to a 25-minute one. By reducing the default meeting duration, you encourage the participants to be more concise and focused, saving you valuable time and giving you the opportunity to wrap up your work promptly and enjoy the extended evening.
Enhancing productivity with ChatGPT
You’ve likely heard a lot about AI recently, particularly the large language model, Chat GPT, which is trained to generate human-like text in response to a prompt.
Writing lengthy emails can be time consuming, but with ChatGPT, you can speed up this task, with a quick prompt, in which you can include the email you’re replying to, the gist of the email you’d like to send back and the tone of voice you’d like to use and ChatGPT has the language processing capability to generate a quick and accurate response – although it’s always worth reading through the response and making sure there aren’t any inaccuracies.
Creating meeting summaries in Microsoft Teams
After a meeting, you may be given the task of summarising the discussion for those in attendance to reflect on or to pass onto those that weren’t able to be there. This can often be time consuming, but this is again something that AI can help with! Microsoft Teams Premium brings with it a new feature that will summarise your Teams meetings once they have finished, so you can now efficiently communicate key meeting points with your team, freeing up your evenings for the outdoors.
Harnessing Microsoft Teams integrated tasks
Microsoft Teams offers an integrated tasks management feature, which enables you to stay organised and focused on your priorities. By creating a task list, you can streamline your workflow and collaborate with your team easily by assigning tasks, setting deadlines and tracking progress across the business. This empowers you to accomplish your work efficiently, leaving you with time to unwind, stress-free.
Prompt responses from your team with Polly
Polly is a useful app which is integrated with Microsoft Teams. This app allows you to gather quick answers from your team in a simple format rather than a lengthy back and forth discussion. You can simply create polls and surveys using Polly to collect feedback or make decisions swiftly, you can select whether to send this individually to each person or in a group chat, and whether the answers will be available to all, just the sender or completely anonymous. By using this instant feedback application, you can receive multiple responses swiftly and ensure that everyone’s input is heard, while freeing up your time.
Streamlining communication with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams provides a quick and easy way to communicate to individuals and teams, freeing you up time from writing emails and awaiting responses. However, Microsoft Teams is not only a platform for communication, but it also offers a range of productivity features. Teams offers the ability to share files, collaborate in real-time, send and receive phone calls and more. By streamlining your communications and tasks all in one place, you reduce the time spent moving between multiple platforms.
Summer evenings are there to be enjoyed. With the aid of productivity features across modern applications such as Outlook and Microsoft Teams as well as handy tools like ChatGPT, Polly and integrated tasks, you can streamline your tasks to promote productive work processes, leaving you with more time to unwind.
Here at Geeks, we have solutions suited to readily solve your IT challenges, save time and enable the achievement of your goals, get in touch to find out how we can help you achieve stress-free IT:
