Boost Your Productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft

Mar 14, 2025

In recent years, the pace and volume of work has skyrocketed. After decades in the corporate trenches, I’ve always prided myself on my business acumen and knack for getting things done—often ahead of schedule. But let’s be honest, the speed of change in the business world, especially with new technology, has hit warp speed.

Ever feel like you’re drowning in your daily to-do list? If you’re like me, you don’t just want to keep up—you want to crush your daily “To Do” list and have more time to do other things.

Data from Microsoft 365 on average shows that power users conduct 18 searches, receive over 250 emails, send or read nearly 150 chats, and juggle 11 apps daily, all while attending 3x more meetings each week. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index Survey found that information workers are nearly twice as likely to believe they need a personal assistant to achieve high performance. Let Microsoft Copilot be your always on, always available personal assistant.

The key to utilizing Microsoft Copilot to boost your productivity starts with writing an effective prompt. Use Craft effective prompts for Microsoft 365 Copilot for step-by-step guidance on how to build specific prompts to use Microsoft 365 Copilot in M365 applications.

Here’s how I get the edge and boost my productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot for everyday tasks on my “To Do” List:

Communication and Collaboration

Email Management Productivity Boost: Copilot in Outlook helps me stay on top of my inbox, draft responses quickly, schedule meetings, and more, saving me time and ensuring I don't miss important communications.
- Prompts I use:
  - Summarize unread emails from today.
  - List the action items from today’s emails in order of priority.
  - Help me set up rules to organize my emails in Outlook.
  - Draft a response to the email from my colleague about the project update.

Meetings Productivity Boost: Using Outlook Calendar, Copilot can help me schedule my meetings, tell me what’s on my agenda for today, help get me prepared for today’s meetings, help me set an automatic reply for my upcoming vacation and more.
- Prompts I use:
  - What is on my agenda for today?
  - Schedule a meeting with my manager for next Monday.
  - Help me prepare for today’s project review meeting.
  - I’m on vacation next week. Please create an automatic reply for me.

Time Management Productivity Boost: Copilot can use Outlook to help me manage my time effectively by creating schedules, prioritizing tasks, optimizing my schedule and ensuring I stay productive and organized. Try Microsoft Viva Insights in Outlook with Copilot to get guidance on how to be more productive. For more information see: Microsoft Viva Insights
- Prompts I use:
  - Create a daily schedule for this week.
  - Prioritize my tasks for today.
  - Optimize my schedule for the week.
  - How can I use Viva Insights to improve my productivity?

Teams Collaboration Productivity Boost: Using Copilot in Microsoft Teams meetings, Copilot facilitates seamless collaboration organizing links given in the meeting, summarizing key points and helping you to prepare for upcoming meetings and more. Remember to turn on the Teams transcript or create a full recording of the meeting to utilize these amazing features.
- Prompts I use:
  - Gather and categorize all the links given in this meeting.
  - Summarize the key points from today's team meeting and list the action items in order of priority and who requested these action items.
  - Prepare a summary of relevant data for tomorrow’s follow-up meeting.
  - Summarize what my boss said during the team meeting and prioritize the action items related to me.

Task Management

Task Productivity Boost: Using Outlook or Teams, Copilot helps me stay organized by managing my tasks, setting goals, tracking progress, and ensuring I stay on top of my workload.
- Prompts I use
  - List the top 5 things I can do to be more efficient with my “To Do” list today. List in order of the most impactful first.
  - What should my goals be for this week?
  - Create a To Do List for next week.
  - Track progress of the February newsletter from the marketing channel.

Content Creation and Management

Document Productivity Boost: Leveraging Copilot in Word helps me draft, summarize, and translate documents and more, saving me time and delivering high-quality output.
- Prompts I use:
  - Create a proposal for our new marketing strategy based on the meeting notes.
  - Summarize the key points from this 100-page document.
  - Write a blog post about the latest tech industry trends.
  - Translate this marketing content into Spanish.
  - Create an image that captures the essence of our service in comic strip style. Include the name of the service.

Presentation Creation Productivity Boost: Using Copilot in PowerPoint assists in creating presentations, adding content, designing slides, using templates and more to help me deliver impactful presentations with ease.
- Prompts I use:
  - Create a presentation from this Word document and generate detailed speaker notes.
  - Create a presentation focusing on five highly effective sales strategies in the retail space.
  - Add a slide with the latest sales figures.
  - Design a cover slide for the project kickoff meeting, including images.

Data Analysis Productivity Boost: Utilizing Copilot in Excel helps me analyze data, create pivot tables, generate charts and so much more, providing me with actionable insights.
- Prompts I use:
  - Analyze the sales data for the last quarter and explain the changes from one month to the next. Identify any trends.
  - Analyze the performance of our latest email campaign from this spreadsheet.
  - Create a pivot table and a chart to summarize the financial data.
  - Create a SWOT analysis for [Company/Project].

Strategies for Using Copilot Daily:

Integrate Copilot into Your Daily Routine:
- Start your day by asking for Copilot’s help on your daily tasks.
  - What productivity tips do you have for me today?
  - What tasks do I have to complete today that I could automate?
  - Help me plan my day to complete all these 10 tasks today.
  - Set reminders for my key tasks today.
  - Suggest ways to optimize my schedule for today
- Use Microsoft Copilot throughout your day to help you catch up, create, learn, edit, design, prepare, code, analyze, manage, schedule, optimize, find people, draft and summarize documents, emails, chats and more.
- End your day by asking Copilot:
  - Summarize my completed tasks from today noting my impact.
  - List the top 3 ways I can be more efficient and effective tomorrow.
  - Analyze the tasks I need to do over the next month, prioritize them and create an action plan to complete them.
  - Review my calendar for tomorrow and suggest any adjustments.
  - List any outstanding tasks that need attention tomorrow.
  - Provide a brief overview of my progress on current projects.
- Practice How to save prompts and Schedule Copilot prompts that you’d like to reuse and run automatically.
- Dedicate a few minutes each day to explore a new prompt or feature in Copilot with the Latest updates for Microsoft 365 Copilot
Use Copilot Prompt Gallery to see hundreds of prompts you can use now. You can get prompt ideas based on the Microsoft App that you are using, tasks you are performing, your job role or enlist a Copilot agent (coach) for even more assistance. Remember to save your prompts for you and your teams to use daily.
Use Copilot everywhere in your M365 Apps and more.
Take Copilot with you wherever you go. I have Copilot loaded on my phone and I am ready to assist anyone, at any time, with any question. See: How to Use AI-powered Copilot on Your Phone.