Staying organized is crucial for SMBs to maintain productivity and efficiency. With the numerous tasks and responsibilities that come with running a business, it can be challenging to manage everything. Microsoft 365 Copilot offers a variety of tools that help simplify your workflow, so you can prioritize what matters, reduce busywork, and keep your business running smoothly.
Here are three tips to help keep things in order using Copilot Notebooks, Copilot in Outlook, and Copilot in Teams.
Tip 1: Create and organize content with Copilot Notebooks
Copilot Notebooks helps keep important things in view. This new capability within Microsoft 365 Copilot allows you to gather, organize, and interact with content in a single, AI-powered workspace. Notebooks is currently in private preview and will begin public rollout later this month.
Think of it as a dynamic scratchpad that makes it easy to pull in files, chats, emails, and meeting notes, enabling more intelligent insights and tailored responses. Notebooks lets you build deeper context over time with longer prompts (up to 18,000 characters), so the responses you get are more relevant, more useful, and more tailored to your goals.
Use Notebooks to:
- Improve customer proposals - Gather past proposals, client emails, meeting notes, and relevant research into one notebook. Use Copilot to summarize client needs, draft proposal sections, and iterate on messaging.
- Streamline project management - Centralize timelines, campaign assets, product specs, and stakeholder feedback. Ask Copilot to identify blockers, generate a workback plan, or summarize status updates.
- Develop a support knowledge base - Compile common issues, chat transcripts, product documentation, and troubleshooting steps. Copilot can suggest responses or summarize patterns in customer feedback.
These are just a few of the possibilities. To get started, go to microsoft365.com/copilot and sign in with your work account. You’ll find “Notebooks” in the left-hand navigation. Click “Create Copilot Notebook”, select content to include, and continue adding references as your project evolves.
Copilot Notebooks make it easy to bring together the content that matters to your task at hand.
Tip 2: Prioritize your emails with Copilot in Outlook
Managing emails can be overwhelming, especially when you're juggling multiple responsibilities. Within Outlook, Prioritize by Copilot can help you cut through the noise, so you can act faster on time-sensitive or high-impact messages, and avoid missing important follow-ups.
Once you’ve finished a simple setup, Copilot marks specific email as “high priority” based upon criteria such as keywords, topics, and people you’ve marked as important, thread activity and urgency, and the sender’s relationship to you (e.g. manager, direct report).
This valuable and easy-to-use tool helps you focus on high-priority emails, reducing the time spent sorting through your inbox and allowing you to address key tasks promptly.
Set up Prioritize by Copilot by opening Outlook, click the Copilot drop-down and select “Prioritize”. Next, click “Set it up”, enter your priority criteria, and then click “Save”.
Within Outlook, click the Copilot dropdown, then select “Prioritize”.
Tip 3: Streamline meetings with Copilot in Teams
It’s easy to have mixed feelings about meetings. They’re an indispensable part of business operations, but they can often be time-consuming and inefficient. Copilot in Teams helps streamline your meeting experiences – from prep to recap – so you can get the most out of your day.
Use Copilot to suggest action items, summarize meeting chats, provide answers to specific questions, and reason over content shared on-screen. Copilot automatically captures areas of agreement, as well as unresolved issues and next steps. Now you can focus on the strategic aspects of your meetings, while keeping everyone on the same page and driving better outcomes.
Let Copilot handle the note taking in your meeting, freeing you to focus on the discussion, while capturing all of the important details.
Your own AI assistant to help organize the workday
Staying organized is fundamental to running a successful small or midsize business, and now, you don’t have to do it alone. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, you have an AI assistant helping you manage the chaos of the day. Whether it’s prioritizing your email in Outlook, pulling everything together in Copilot Notebooks, or making meetings more productive in Teams, Copilot helps you remain focused on what matters most.
With a little help from Copilot, you can work smarter, respond faster, and stay a step ahead.
