A few days ago I covered a tech backed methodology called Pomodoro technique, to boost your productivity. Next logical step in this sequence is to how to measure productivity while working from home . With each five minute conversation over lunch/nicotine breaks, turning into a 30 minute teams meeting, it is very important to understand how much time you leave for yourself to focus on the work.

With so much to accomplish amidst so many distractions, there has to be a way I can track all these key metrics. Well, there is! Enter, Microsoft MyAnalytics. I’ll be honest, Microsoft sends you such analysis every week but since it goes into the ‘others’ inbox, I ignored it. After I saw it once, I found it really useful.

What is MyAnalytics?

MyAnalytics is a tool from Microsoft that helps you get some insights on the time spent on meetings and collaboration via emails and slots dedicated to ‘focus‘. Therefore, helping you plan your time wisely and reduce non productive meetings. Available for all office 365 users, tool leverages the tightly integrated ecosystem of Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint and OneDrive.

This personalized dashboard, also shares insights on the time spent on collaboration outside work hours. Let’s dive into each of the features of the tool individually.

Measuring Productivity using MyAnlytics:

1. Focus Time:

A simple pie chart in this section tells you how much of your time is left to focus on your tasks outside calls, meetings and emails. This functionality will also help you to block certain time of the day for your tasks. This will show as ‘Focus Time’ on your calendar if anyone tries to block it.

2. Wellbeing:

With increased focus on employee wellbeing, this feature aims to measure the days/hours you were able to disconnect. These precious hours are called ‘Quiet Hours‘. This section would measure the hours where there was no significant work (mails/calls) outside your work hours (weekends including).

This section is a real eye opener. It would go to the extent of telling us, what causes disruption in our silent hours. Also, it will tell you the people who you spend most time with, outside work hours.

This functionality would also encourage you to reduce outflow of emails during non working hours by telling you the trend. Be the change you want to see in the world (organization)

3. Network

This one is a really nice to understand our network in workplace. It will tell the the number of people you have met/mailed in past.

In a very neat map view, it will tell me the collaborators with filters such as active/external/new and important (I presume they are the ones which are top collaborators).

4. Collaboration:

This section gives you a breakup of all the collaborations in terms of emails, chats, mails and meetings.

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It will also give me a glimpse of my meeting habits. I find these insights quite relevant. Clicking on either of these will show you the meeting wise data. So, if you ask me, I am mailing/chatting in 37% of the meetings. Questions I should ask myself are that do I really need to attend these meetings at all then?

It will tell me the break down of my collaboration methods as well.

Conclusion:

I think it is a good eye opener of a tool. I never knew certain data points which this tool helped me gather. It will definitely help me measure my productivity with some really good data backed insights. You can check with your system administrator if you have licenses for using this tool. In case you do, you can access your MyAnalytics from here. The question: how to measure productivity while working from home is gaining importance each day now. It is more important than ever in the remote working scenario to understand if you are on the right track or not.