During the Covid19 global pandemic nearly two thirds of employees and workers around the world experienced significant changes to their workplace routines, including home working challenges. This inevitably led to disruption to their personal space and organisation of their time.

In July 2020 Microsoft spoke about time being one of the most precious and scarce resources. Almost a year later, people are still struggling with the daily activities such as effective prioritisation, organising their time and managing meetings.

To help workers tackle these issues and organise their time, Microsoft are updating Outlook with two new efficiency tools.

Everything just the way you like it with NEW Microsoft Outlook calendar board.

Organising time across work and personal life can be overwhelming, with a balance required in today’s digital first world. 71% of information workers say they have several personal and home responsibilities they must manage during working hours and 66% have had their typical workday highly disrupted.

Employees need a mixture of tools to ensure they get everything needed done on time. But switching back and forth between apps or systems can be challenging in itself; with increased cognitive load and reduction in flow.

Microsoft believed there was a better way to manage the most important and urgent tasks on your to do list, all in one place. To facilitate this, they have re-imagined the Outlook calendar and added board view. The tool will allow users to quickly organise their time, and Outlook favourites such as tasks, notes, files, goals and reminders in a singular view.

By selecting board view on your Outlook application, users access the ever-expanding board ready to customise as you go. With the ability to create a customisable dashboard everything is at the users’ fingertips, reducing the need for context switching and increasing efficiency.

Microsoft Timelines: The newly designed Microsoft Outlook board will be rolled out to Outlook on the web first and available soon to customers with a commercial or education license.

Intelligent Scheduling

Finding a convenient time for multiple stakeholders to meet is high on the list of most people’s pain points during the working day. As the demand for meetings increases, the task becomes repetitive and more difficult to manage.

Although there are work arounds available such as delegating to a colleague or Cortana via the Scheduler tool, not all meetings can be created equally and need some more finessing. This is where Microsoft’s new AI service steps in. The tool will intelligently look for options fitting the user’s requirements and help re-work their calendar to accommodate it.

Using Outlook mobile, a user can now schedule a meeting indicating preferable duration and time frame. The tool will intuitively look for times which work for all the attendees. If a meeting slot meeting the criteria cannot be found, Outlook will provide suggestions for when others are free. This intelligentially helps the user decisions on options not restricted to their current schedule. If the user chooses to move something to accommodate a new meeting, Outlook will help in finding an appropriate time to reschedule the original commitment.

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More information of updates and release dates can be found here:

Microsoft – Work without limits – 2021 Announcements – Shaping Cloud