Microsoft To Do

Digital Wellbeing and working smart in Microsoft 365

Ståle Hansen Leave a comment

Digital Wellbeing in Microsoft 365 is about working smart with the tools you have at your disposal. There is a difference between having access to the tools and using them as intended. With the introduction of Microsoft Viva and specifically Viva Insights, we now see where Microsoft is headed. They are now all about using the tools and building good collaboration cultures. Viva Insights can measure meeting culture, chat culture and how much off hours working is done. But it is not enough to just tell people to use less internal emails, move away from chat and over to channels and work less in evenings. It is difficult to envision how to work in a different way when the change that needs to happen must happen in the individual and in the group.

This is where Digital Wellbeing comes in to the picture. The four modules I have defined as part of Digital Wellbeing is the HOW and WHAT when culture shows you WHY you need to change. The four modules are

  • Capture
  • Process & Execute
  • Teams Culture
  • Notifications

Full workshop for free on YouTube

During March 2022 I recorded everything I know about Digital Wellbeing and you get the all four modules for free. This ended up as 8 hours and 30 minutes of insights, demos and how to’s. You can view the full index with timestamps under each video in this blogpost.

Watch the explainer video

To get started, watch the video explaining the four modules in 14 minutes

Module 1 – Capture

Capture is all about storing your thoughts, ideas, dreams and tips in to Microsoft To Do. Meeting notes and deeper notes are captured in OneNote. The goal is to create stash-zones for your content so that you find them again. Why exactly To Do and OneNote? Watch my deep dive video explaining everything you need to know to get started with capture.

Modul 2 – Process & Execute

Taking capture to the next level is to reflect, process and organize your captured material. A task in To Do which you have captured could be a link to an article you want to read, reference material for your project, it could be someone asking you for more information or the start of a project. Organizing this unstructured information and breaking the tasks in to goals and actions will help “future you” make sense of the captures. The execute component of this module is about prioritizing the most important tasks for you that day, reserving time in your calendar using focus time in Viva Insights and using the Pomodoro technique to focus on one task for at least 25 minutes without distracting yourself. At the end of the day, you reflect on how the day went by using Viva Insights Virtual Commute. This is much harder than it sounds so we need to talk about this. Watch my deep dive video explaining all the details for this module

  • Digital Wellbeing: 0:00
  • Agenda: 5:40
  • Lists and List groups in ToDo: 7:47
  • Sorting and prioritizing tasks: 18:09
  • Recurring tasks: 28:19
  • Section Groups in OneNote: 36:21
  • Reflecting on your career: 41:28
  • Sorting to OneNote: 52:29
  • Organizing meeting notes: 55:01
  • Sorting to Microsoft Lists? 1:02:04
  • Planning time for focus: 1:16:17
  • Get started with My Day: 1:27:19
  • Breaking tasks into actions: 1:41:19
  • Executing on your tasks: 1:48:18
  • Reflecting on your day: 2:21:16
  • End note: 2:39:40

Module 3 – Teams Culture

For you to have a good day in Teams three things needs to happen

  1. Conversations about processes needs to move from chats to channel conversations so that you get the ability to mute parts of the conversation.
  2. We want larger Teams with more channels, rather than many teams with fewer channels and we want people to tag a person, a tag or the channel when reaching out. Never tag the Team (unless you are the Team owner or administrator) because there is no way of muting those notifications.
  3. Meetings should start and end in channel conversations, or chats if they are ad-hoc meetings. In that way we may save a number of meetings that are meetings about the meetings you are going to have and meetings about the meetings you just had. That is just a waste of time, respect yours and your colleagues time.

These are the topics we cover in the Teams culture module, watch the deep dive session here

Module 4 – Notifications

Notifications is the #1 skill everyone needs to master the next decade. Why? Work is not a place it is a mindset. The moment you see a notification about work, you instantly get pulled in to work mode. What more is that a timer seems to go off in your head and you feel you need to respond within 30 minutes. This is the challenge we are living in today, that you get notifications about not important information at the wrong time. There are three questions you need to ask yourself when you get a notification on your computer or mobile

  1. Why did you get the notification?
  2. Was it useful?
  3. How can you tune it so you get it not at all or at the correct time

This is what we dive in to in the module 4 video and we take is far as going through how to disconnect during vacation. Read my Microsoft TechCommunity article on notifications to get a jump start.

  • Digital Wellbeing 0:00
  • The challenge with notifications 5:02
  • Notifications in Teams 18:41
  • Quiet time in Teams mobile 32:37
  • Notifications in social media 47:48
  • Digital Wellbeing on Android 1:08:33
  • How to vacation 1:21:01
  • How to vacation Book time 1:28:05
  • How to vacation Inbox Zero and Brain dump 1:34:48
  • How to vacation Plan your first week getting back 1:40:34
  • How to vacation Quiet Time 1:43:30
  • End Note 1:47:23

End note

Digital Wellbeing can help you get your head above the water, perform better at work and at home and it will just make you happier in your life. Happiness comes from you feeling you are mastering your busy day and using the tools in smart way and removing stress from your life. That is what Digital Wellbeing is all about.

Set the custom Focusing status in Microsoft Teams from To Do using Power Automate

Ståle Hansen 5 Comments

I am happy to announce that I have a free NoCode alternative for setting the Focusing status in Microsoft Teams! This is a follow up post to one of my most popular blog posts in 2020, Set the custom Focusing status in Microsoft Teams using Power Automate invoked through PowerShell.

Update 06.10.20: Updated the flow to better handle expected failure, should now exit as success if the task has no number. Download and import the Power Automate flow from GitHub. Found a logical issue 08.10.20, the Flow is now updated👍

The Focusing custom Teams status can only be set by MyAnalytics via a calendar event called ‘Focus time‘. I have not been able to recreate this calendar event type manually, so it must be something in the header. During a ‘Focus time‘ calendar event, the Teams client sets the status to Do Not Disturb with a custom name called Focusing. Personally, I don’t like the current way MyAnalytics schedules this event since it is two hours long and weeks in advance. I need a way to set this status at the time I am focusing, to mute distractions and tell my peers that I am in a focus, deep work, flow Pomodoro sprint. This is why I created this routine.

Here is how to get started with Focusing custom Teams status

  • Create the ‘Focus time‘ calendar event in MyAnalytics
  • Navigate to your personal dashboard at https://myanalytics.microsoft.com/
    • See prerequisites further down in the blogpost
  • Click on Focus in the left menu
  • Click book now to get a ‘Focus time‘ event in your calendar which will set your Teams client in Focusing status for the duration of the calendar event
  • When this is done, it is possible to leave the plan under plan configuration or by using the below link, to avoid getting future calendar events like this.

How it works and watch the YouTube explainer video

Watch the YouTube video where I demonstrate how the routine works and how to get started

Instead of using the premium HTTP request trigger, I now use the free NoCode Microsoft To Do trigger. When a new task is created, the Power Automate flow runs, finds your default calendar, finds an existing Focus time calendar event in your language and sets the time for your Pomodoro sprint duration. It even has an option to use IFTTT to mute your phone during the sprint.

Background

I am a Pomodoro Technique enthusiast. During a Pomodoro sprint it is important to mute distractions. This worked fine with custom presence states in Skype for Business, which is one of my most popular blog posts to date. I also published a very popular blog post on a routine to use HTTP request trigger in Power Automate to set the Focusing custom mode in Microsoft Teams. The problem with that routine is that it required coding and you needed to trigger it in PowerShell using a premium trigger. To Do triggers are included in most Office 365 SKU’s. Download and import the Power Automate flow from GitHub to see how the flow is built.

  • Make sure all prerequisites are met as the described below
  • Open Microsoft To Do
  • In any list, you create a new task and in the subject you put the time interval you want to do a Pomodoro sprint to achieve deep work/flow state/focus time
    • This technique even works from mobile and web!
    • I recommend you create a Pomodoro list in To Do to keep them all in the same place and so they don’t clutter your actual Tasks
  • Up to 3 minutes later, the Power Automate flow will trigger
    • I have tuned the timers in such a way that both the calendar event and the IFTTT trigger will start at the time you created the To Do task, and not when the flow is triggered
  • The flow will then access your primary calendar and create a copy of the current Focus time event and call it “Old Focus time” for historical purposes
    • This works regardless of language of the calendar and the Focus time calendar event, I check for primary calendar and use criteria to find the correct calendar event
  • Then the flow will get the latest Focus time event and update it with the time your To Do task was created and end the event using the number you put in the To Do task subject
  • When the calendar event is created, Teams will almost instantly update it’s status and put you in to the custom Focusing status, which has the same capabilities as if you set yourself to Do Not Disturb
  • When the calendar event is done, you will revert back to the correct status for your current time, busy if you are busy in calendar or available if you do not have anything else in your calendar
  • Now you can go to your meeting or evaluate which task is most important for you and trigger a new Pomodoro sprint :)

Prerequisites

  • Calendar must be in Exchange Online
  • You must have MyAnalytics as part of your license and enabled
    • Schedule 1 period with MyAnalytics to get the calendar event
    • Available in Enterprise SKU’s
    • I recommend to turn it off again after the first run, so that you calendar does not get flooded with weekly Focusing time events
  • Download and import the Power Automate flow from GitHub
    • Go to Power Automate in https://portal.office.com
    • Navigate to My flows and click Import
    • No changes are needed in the actual flow after import is finished
  • Find one of your Focus time calendar event and set priority to low
    • This can only be done in Outlook desktop client
  • In order to find the correct calendar entry we are checking for the following
    • Priority low
    • Category: Green Category
      • In my tests the category will be named Green even though you are using a different language
    • We find the first one and edit that event, to make sure we are not editing all events
      • The flow stops after one event is edited
  • Optional bonus, not required
    • If you install the flow app on your mobile, you can get a notification on you mobile when the Pomodoro sprint starts and when it stops
    • You an use that notification to trigger an IFTTT action on Android and iOS to set them to do not disturb at the start and turn it off again
    • I even use the IFTTT trigger to control a hue light in my office, set it to red during the Pomodoro sprint and green when finishing :)
    • Read more about IFTTT triggers for pomodoro sprint here
    • In order to enable the IFTTT part of the flow, you need to go in and edit it and set the IFTTTIntegration variable to 1. It is set to 0, disabled, by default

Power Automate techniques I used to accomplish this flow

In the coming weeks I will publish separate blog posts on how I created a universal flow which works out of the box in any environment. In the meantime you can download the flow from GitHub and take a look

  • How to find the default Outlook calendar for a person regardless of language
  • How to find the default Microsoft To Do tasks list for a person regardless of language
  • How to find a specific calendar event based on category
  • How I used ticks() to find time difference in Power Automate and what I used it for
  • Substring() techniques in Power Automate
  • If() in Power Automate
  • Math is hard in Power Automate, here is how i used sub(), div(), addminutes() and length()
  • Named variables and comments in Power Automate

Use Power Automate to send Teams messages to To Do #NoCode

Ståle Hansen 6 Comments

I am a productivity enthusiast. I use Microsoft To Do for my individual task management. When someone has a task for me in Microsoft Teams I need to get them in to To Do. MVP Vesa Nopanen created a Power Automate routine for doing this which works great. In his blog post, he talks about how to create it and how to share it with select users within your organization. I have tuned this routine to make it universally available so that no changes to the code is need for it to run in your organization. How? Read on

I created the universal routine which you can download from GitHub and try for yourself. Just import it, authorize access to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft To Do and you are good to go. Check out Vesa’s blogpost for how to share it in the organization

Originally the routine checked for the name of your tasks folder, but I found a way to do that programmatically, since the name of the folder is different depending on your language. The flow will look up the lists in user context and from there we can check which is the default one. Tasks is always the default one.

I did one more thing. When capturing the text to go in the task, I wanted to limit the length of the subject to 150 characters.

  1. I had to convert the output from Teams to plain text
  2. Then I checked the length of the body
    • if it was short than 150 characters, I used that as length,
    • if the body was more than 150 characters I limited it to 150.
    • if(lessOrEquals(length(outputs(‘Html_to_text’)?[‘body’]),150),length(outputs(‘Html_to_text’)?[‘body’]),150)
  3. Finally I created a string variable which is no longer than 150 characters and used it in the subject.
    • substring(outputs(‘Html_to_text’)?[‘body’],0,outputs(‘Compose’))

That’s it, simple and effective. You can download the flow from GitHub, make sure you read the original blog post for full details. MVP Yannick Reekmans has a different take to accomplish this using a graph approach. You still need the above routine to get the default task list.

When importing the flow, you need to have these connectors available so that you can complete the import. All connectors are part of your Office 365 subscription

Updated my #Pomodoro #PowerShell timer

Ståle Hansen Leave a comment

Ever been so busy you can’t get anything done? What do I do during those times? Spend time optimizing my productivity routine of course. June 2020 was super busy period for me and I found that my PowerShell Pomodoro timer needed some tuning to be easier to use. Download the updated script from GitHub. I have done the following changes

  • Hide Badges on taskbar buttons
  • Create a shortcut to start it in a fast and simple way
  • Fixed so that presentationsettings.exe works in 64bit PowerShell
  • Read my original post about this script
  • Pomodoro is a technique to induce flow in a busy workday through single tasking. Read more at the end of this blogpost

Hide badges on taskbar buttons

Instead of stopping Microsoft Teams, I hide the badges on taskbar buttons such as Outlook, Teams and Microsoft To Do. You must have access to changing the registry for this to work which was the best approach I could find.

#Hide badge or stop Teams
if ($Teamsmode -notmatch "HideBadge"){
    #Stop Microsoft Teams
    Write-Host "Closing Microsoft Teams" -ForegroundColor Green
    Get-Process -Name Teams -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Stop-Process -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}
else{
    #Hiding badges on taskbar buttons such as Outlook, Teams and ToDo
    Write-Host "Hiding badges on taskbar buttons" -ForegroundColor Green
    Set-Itemproperty -path 'HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced' -Name 'TaskbarBadges' -value '0'
    Stop-Process -ProcessName explorer
}

During hide badge you will not see status in the taskbar icons, which helps you keep focus during the Pomodoro sprint.

When the Pomodoro sprint is finished, it will show badges again

Showing badge on taskbar app is new in Microsoft To Do and can be turned on or off under settings, I prefer to turn it off

Create a shortcut to start it in a fast and simple way

In order to start the script in an fast and simple way, you can create a shortcut to the script.

  1. On you desktop, right click and select new shortcut
  2. In the shortcut target box, type the following:
    • powershell.exe -noexit -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File
  3. File is the path where you stored the Start-SimplePomodoro.ps1
    • “C:\Users\UserName\OneDrive – CloudWay\Dokumenter\GitHub\MyScripts\Start-SimplePomodoro\Start-MySimplePomodoro.ps1”
  4. I have crated an Icon you can use for the shortcut which you can find on GitHub
  5. If you pin it to you taskbar, you can easily start your Pomodoro sprint

Fixed so that presentationsettings.exe works in 64bit PowerShell

I use presentationsettings.exe to put the computer in presentation mode which supresses popups from all you applications and Windows 10. This is an 32bit application. I found that 64bit PowerShell could not find this due to the feature, File System Redirector. I found a workaround and incorporated it in the script so that it works wherever you are running it

Write-Host "Starting presentation mode" -ForegroundColor Green
if (Test-Path "C:\Windows\sysnative\PresentationSettings.exe"){Start-Process "C:\Windows\sysnative\PresentationSettings.exe" /start -NoNewWindow}
else {presentationsettings /start}

By pointing 64bit PowerShell to the path C:\Windows\sysnative\ I was able to run 32bit apps like PresentationSettings.

The result

Download the script from GitHub

The goal is to induce the flow state in a busy workday

Multitasking is a myth. The goal is to reach the flow state by focusing on one task at a time. Have you ever started writing an email, thought you sent it and eagerly waiting for a response, only to find it incomplete and unsent at the end of the day? This is one of the perils of multitasking.

The Pomodoro Technique is a great methodology to induce flow in a busy workday. It is all about avoiding distractions for 15-25 minutes and focus on one task at a time. This is a short enough period in the day that you can squeeze it in before a meeting. It is incredible what you can get done 15-25 minutes. The goal is to not get distracted and it takes about 7 minutes of focus before you reach your flow state.

If you want to succeed with Pomodoro, you need to make yourself unavailable. Equally important, you need to make yourself available again when those 25 minutes have passed. That is why we created the Pomodoro PowerShell tool, and why I love the simplicity of this approach.

Watch an outtake from my session at Microsoft Ignite 2017 on single-tasking

Learn more on my thinking around single-tasking and tools available to succeed with the flow state, from this outtake of my OneNote LifeHacks talk at Microsoft Ignite 2017

Happy deep work!