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The 4 modules of Digital Wellbeing in Microsoft 365

By Stale Hansen

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

Watch the video explaining the 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 and using the Pomodoro technique to focus on one task for at least 25 minutes without distracting yourself. 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

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.

Digital Wellbeing can help you get your head above the water, perform better at work and at home and it will just make you happy 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.

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