This simple tool could help you get a better work/life balance in 2019

A tool that shows people how long they spend in meetings, answering emails and working late has been rolled out to more users.

MyAnalytics aims to help staff improve how they work and prevent burnout by giving them a round-up of how they spend their day in the office, and suggests ways to free up time to get a better work/life balance.

The Microsoft program is now available to everyone using Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Business suites that include Exchange Online. It was previously only available to those on an Enterprise E5 plan or as an add-on to E1 and E3 plans.

“A recent Gallup study found that two-thirds of full-time employees say they experience burnout at work,” Natalie McCullough, General Manager of Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “Multiple factors are contributing to burnout, such as the increased pace of work, a rise in collaborative work like chats, emails, and meetings, and the continuing trend of technology blurring the lines between work and life.

“Our customers tell us they’re looking for ways to address these challenges by helping employees find time to focus, improve work-life balance, build better meeting habits and create deeper connections with their colleagues. By making MyAnalytics features more broadly available to our millions of customers, it is our goal to make work days around the world a little more balanced and fulfilling.”

MyAnalytics gives users a personal dashboard, showing them the number of hours spent in meetings, reading and sending emails, working late and focused on uninterrupted tasks. It also uses artificial intelligence to flag up commitments they have made in an email. To protect privacy, people can only see their own data.

Up until now, the service has focused on Outlook emails and meetings, and Skype for Business calls and chats but will soon include Microsoft Teams calls and chat and signals from documents saved in OneDrive and SharePoint.

The analytics rollout came as Microsoft announced it will release two new security and compliance packages on February 1 – Identity & Threat Protection and Information Protection & Compliance.