If you’re an Office 365 user, you may have recently seen a new app option in your dashboard: MyAnalytics. This app shows you how you’re spending your work time: everything from how much time you’re spending on email to who you collaborate with the most to your meetings habits).
On the surface, it can feel a little icky at first – how does Microsoft know all this? But it’s all information already available in your calendar and email. If you really wanted to, you could figure out how long you spend in meetings every day and how much time you spend emailing people while you’re in a meeting. MyAnalytics just takes the work out of it and puts it in an easy to read dashboard.
MyAnalytics actually isn’t new - it’s just been buried within the Delve application (if you click the icon for My Analytics in your dashboard and it takes you to Delve, the MyAnalytics option is in the right sidebar). Microsoft has just made it more visible and easier to access.
The app is broken down into a few sections:
Your Time Overview
This gives a basic look at how you’re spending your time: meeting hours, email hours, focus hours, and after hours work.
Network
This section looks at who you’re working with, including your top collaborators. You can add your manager and other important people to this section to see how you communicate (only you will see this).
Meetings
This section breaks down how long you spend in meetings and your habits during meetings. One bad habit a lot of us are guilty of is multi-tasking in meetings (Microsoft tracks this by emails sent during a scheduled meeting time).
This section breaks down how much time you spend on email and how you (and others) interact with email (like how long it takes you to reply to an email on average). There is also a MyAnalytics add-in for Outlook included in the license that will give you more insight into emails directly within Outlook.
Focus Hours
This sections shows how much time is available to you to focus. Microsoft defines “focus hours” as at least two consecutive hours without a meeting. Obviously, it can’t keep track of the little things that distract us all throughout the day, so this section should be looked at more as a “How long do I have in a day to potentially work?” rather than how long you were actually focused.
After Hours
This shows you much time you spent working after hours. After hours work includes meetings and emails outside your defined working day. If work/life balance is important to you, this can be a real eye opener about how much you’re actually doing outside the office.
MyAnalytics is included in Office 365 Enterprise E5 licenses or is available as an add-on to other plans for $4/user/month. It isn’t going to be useful for everyone. Some people will look at it once and never use it again. But if you’re serious about changing bad habits (like multi-tasking during meetings) or improving your productivity, MyAnalytics can be a useful tool to see where you’re doing well and where you have room for improvement.
