Does planning and organising really float your boat? 

OR…do you live in unorganised chaos, but long to kick-ass at organising? 

Either way, you might be surprised about how Microsoft tools can help you!  

In this blog you will learn: 

• What Viva Insights is 
• How to use Microsoft Viva Insights to schedule focus time 
• Why planning focus time is important if you want to stay on top of your tasks  

What is Microsoft Viva Insights 

Insights is just one module of the Viva suite, which is Microsoft’s employee experience platform. They’re adding new modules to it all the time; here’s a useful place to keep up with what’s coming if you’re interested: Welcome to the Microsoft Viva Community – Microsoft Community Hub

Some of the Viva modules cost extra money to use, but if you use Teams for work, you’ll likely find that you can add the Viva Insights app. 

Go to apps on the left hand side of your Teams window, type Viva insights into search, and you should see it: 

The first time you open it, you’re reminded that you can pin the app to your side bar, so that you can quickly find it again. 

If you click around the various areas, you’ll find a lot of useful features and content, but let’s focus on how to schedule yourself some focus time. 

How Viva Insights can help you plan your focus time

In the wellbeing section of the app, you should find some suggested tasks – one of which is ‘Start a daily focus plan’: 

If you click the set daily focus plan button, you’ll find that Insights has reserved ‘up to 2 hours’ of focus time per day. Check out your calendar and you’ll see that the appointments for focus time have been added to your calendar: : 

You’ll also see that if you already have other meetings and appointments scheduled in your diary, Insights will work the focus time slots around those, so you don’t have to shuffle things around yourself, clever eh?! 

If you do want to change the focus slots, you can drag and drop them around on your calendar like any other appointment. 

Insights books the focus slots for you on a weekly rolling basis, so they aren’t all added to your calendar on a perpetual basis right away. Don’t panic if you don’t see focus time booked out for the next 3 weeks. 

You can also change the settings on how focus time is booked by going back into the app. Here’s how: 

Once you have set a focus plan, when you go back into the Wellbeing area you’ll get a latest summary, which includes the option to change your settings:  

You can change the amount of focus time, and choose whether it defaults to being scheduled in the morning or the afternoon: 

Once you save the changes, Insights will act accordingly next time it books focus time for you. 

Insights will also send you emails that will tell you if it can’t find enough focus time slots for you, and make suggestions to book focus time if you haven’t already. 

Why planning focus time is important if you want to stay on top of your tasks 

I think the answer to this is pretty obvious but I’ll write it anyway; how are you supposed to get anything done if you spend all day in meetings? You can’t. 

By scheduling focus time you protect your diary from getting booked out left right and centre, as others will see those focus slots as busy (and so will you!). I think this is especially important post-covid where more and more online meetings are taking place. 

One of the reasons I love setting focus time is because when the focus time slot begins, Insights will automatically change your Teams status to ‘Focusing’, which is pretty much the same as do not disturb. 

This means that you won’t get Teams chat and incoming call notifications during the focus time window, so you’re free to really concentrate without lots of pinging diverting your attention. 

Also, by blocking out big chunks of time, you give yourself a chance to get some quality concentrating time and delve into those meaty tasks, instead of picking off short, low-value tasks because that’s all you have time for. 

Plus – if Insights can’t find a slot to schedule focus time for you, that should be a bit of an alarm-bell to tell you that you aren’t leaving yourself enough time outside of meetings and other appointments to get work done. 

As I say with all my Get Organised blogs, this tool won’t do your work for you, but it at least sets you up to have a chance of getting your work done. 

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