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 a weekly preview is 
• What Updates are in Microsoft Teams 
• How to use Updates to automate your weekly review process
• Why I think using Updates is great for a weekly review and getting you organised around your goals 

What is a weekly preview 

If you’ve ever heard of ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen, you’ll be familiar with the GTD methodology for managing tasks and time. There’s a huge community of GTD-ers who swear by it, so if you haven’t – I do recommend checking it out! I don’t follow GTD to the letter, but one of the ‘rituals’ I’ve taken from it which I love and is now part of my weekly schedule is the weekly preview. 

The idea behind the weekly preview is having a regular check-in that keeps you on track with your big goals by 

• forcing you to review your progress on them and 
• specify the smaller steps you’ll take this week to help get you closer to those goals. 

There are various planners and templates that you can use as a starting point for this if you’re completely new to the idea. I think if you’re just starting out it doesn’t need to be overly complicated either. You could start with some simple questions: 

• What were my biggest wins of last week? 
• How far did I get with my goal targets for the week?
• What could I change to keep me on top of my goal targets this week? (The answer to this could be ‘nothing’!)
• My top 3 goal targets for this week are:  

I’ve found that having a weekly slot set aside to think this through, and properly sticking to it every week, I’ve felt more zoned in on my goals and more on top of things.

If you want to find out a bit more about the weekly preview process and how you could start to go about it, I’d recommend this read: https://fullfocus.co/the-importance-of-the-weekly-review/ 

If you use Microsoft Teams at work, there’s a handy Updates app that you can use to help you automate the process of your weekly review, reminding you to do it in the first place and defining the structure for you each time so that you don’t have to worry about copying and pasting every week.   

What are Updates in Microsoft Teams?

Updates in Teams is an app that can help you create workflows to request updates from other people. To see if you have access to the app, go to apps and search for Updates: 

You can find out more about Updates from the Microsoft Learn pages here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-updates-app – I think it was designed for managers and project leaders to have an automated way to get updates from their team members, BUT, as you can also request updates from yourself, you can sort of ‘hack’ it for your weekly preview process.

Here’s how…

How the Teams Updates app can help automate your weekly preview 

Firstly – you’ll have to find the app in the app store and open it, as I showed above. When you press ‘Open’ you’ll get a walkthrough of the very basics: 

You’’ll want to pin the app to your left hand bar by right clicking on it and choosing ‘pin’ so that you can easily find it again later. 

The last step on the welcome walkthrough is to choose whether you submit or request an update – choose request: 

What you’re about to do is create: 

• How your weekly preview template will be structured – ie the questions you’ll have to answer 
• When you’ll get reminded to complete your weekly preview 

There are templates available – but starting from blank is just as easy: 

Give your weekly preview a title and description – you don’t need to over complicate this: 

Then click next and move on to form design: 

Here is where you’ll start adding your questions or prompts for each time you complete your weekly preview. 

They should focus on how you are making progress on your goals, and if you’re new, I’d suggest starting small. Start with the end in mind and work backwards, what steps to you need to take to get there? And which of those steps can you realistically achieve this week?

When you click on add question, you can add all sorts of different types of question/prompt – you’ll likely lean towards the short text or rich text questions so that you can be a bit flexible with your answers (as sometimes goals can vary in type from week to week):

Keep adding questions until you’re happy with your weekly preview structure. Then click next again: 

This is where we get automating! 

Put your own name into specify submitters and the request for this ‘update’ will come only to you:

Then in set due date and recurrence, choose the weekly time you’ll complete your weekly preview: 

Funny enough, you’ll need to choose weekly, but then you can choose the exact day and time of the week: 

Note that you’ll get a reminder 2 hours before this ‘update request’ is due – so if you want your reminder to pop up at a specific time like 9am, you’ll have to set the due time as 11am. 

Don’t forget to hit save. 

The last step is to click on publish: 

You’ll get a success message so you’ll know that it’s worked: 

And when the update is due, you’ll get a notification in your Teams feed: 

When you click on it – the form template that you created for your weekly preview appears: 

You can type into it and press submit – easy peasy! 

Why I think using Updates is great for a weekly review and getting you organised around your goals 

I think the weekly preview ritual in general is a game changer for helping you get organised and hold yourself accountable to progress on your goals. Whether you use this format or not I’d encourage you to start the practice of it. 

What I like about using the Updates app for it is: 

• You get an automated reminder every week to complete it, right inside Teams which should get your attention if you use Teams day to day. 
• The form format is easy to fill in (which opens up straight from the reminder by the way – so no hunting around for documents) and keeps your structure set without you having to worry about copying and pasting excel sheets or tables in word every time – you can focus on thinking about your goals, not how to format the weekly preview process.  
• You can also review what you’ve written any time by going back into the Updates app: 

Clicking on your latest submission will give you a full view of what you wrote on it: 

 So if you need a mid-week check to see if you’re still on track with your goal targets, you can easily get hold of them. 

You can also edit the questions from the app too, so if you find the weekly preview is working well for you and you’d like to add more questions to it, maybe about reviewing your calendar appointments or adding a gratitude step, you can do that too. Make your weekly preview fully customised to you and get organised in achieving your goals. 

Got questions or comments? Hit me up!

If you know someone who might like this blog – please share it!