Regardless of what your job is, one of the best ways to boost your own productivity is by reducing the amount of time you spend on manual tasks. Anything you do over and over, day after day, can very likely be automated. In fact, we think human-assisted automation is one of the most underappreciated features of Microsoft Office.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the top 5 best ways to save yourself time at work.
1. Email rules
Most corporate jobs require hours spent on reading and responding to emails. One of the best ways to get ahead of the productivity game is to manage this workflow, and the best way to save yourself time is through a robust set of email rules.
You can do a lot with email rules – more than just sort them into folders to help you stay organized. If someone sends you an email attachment every month, you can create a rule to auto-save the file with a unique date-time stamp in a specific location.
2. Delay send emails
Another way to get more of your time back is by batching the time you spend reading and responding to emails. But an unwritten rule of a lot of companies is that you must be responding to emails frequently throughout the day, plus nobody likes receiving email after work hours.
Delay send allows you to set specific down-to-the-minute times for sending your replies. This means you can spend some time for example at the end of the day replying to everyone’s emails, but “delay send” it the next morning at 7:35am. This has the added benefit of making it seem like you are up early, working hard, getting a jump on the day. But just note, if your Outlook works like most people, you have to have your computer turned on for this to work.
3. Delay send Teams chats / Slack messages
Microsoft Teams and Slack both come with handy built-in delay send features. I’m often on really long and boring calls, with requests pending from people waiting for me in my chats. One way to multi-task is by responding to these requests, but “delay send” them until the right when the meeting is scheduled to attend. This makes it seem like you are working between meetings, when really you can take an actual break.
4. Outlook email Quick Steps
Many corporate procedures and policies require you to respond to the same types of emails over and over again. Maybe you have to approve someone’s time off, submit an invoice to get paid, or acknowledge that you approve some change.
Outlook comes with a nifty feature that allows you to predefine actions and templates through Quick Steps. With one or two clicks, or even through a keyboard shortcut, you can essentially automate what would otherwise be a manual task.
5. Calendar invite rules
Another way to reduce clutter and improve your productivity at work is by moving your calender invite traffic to its own folder. You can automatically mark meeting invite responses as “read” and move them to a separate folder. You can also automatically accept calendar invites from specific people or groups of people, which has an added benefit of making your boss believe you are eager to do whatever he or she wants.
Bonus hack #1: Leverage Power Automate responsibility
Power Automate is a fantastic platform, but use it with caution. You can create your own automations for both serious and fun things at work. For example, I have a rule that will automatically reply with negative comments whenever someone mentions a sports team in a chat. I also have a one-click automation that allows me to post a variation of the comment “what is everyone doing this weekend” (with a built-in timed delay) into several different chat groups. But the possibilities are almost endless for how you might dream up your own integrations and automations.
Bonus hack #2: Start your upskilling journey today
If you work in tech, chances are there are a variety of tools and frameworks that you can learn to make your life easier. But what should you learn next? To help get you started, we have skills assessments which can act as roadmaps for your upskilling journey. Check it out today!
