Work Smarter with Office 365 MyAnalytics

As luck would have it, Microsoft 365 has an amazing feature called MyAnalytics. This feature helps keep you focused on the most important tasks at hand by providing personalized insights about how you spend your time at work. It gives you data-driven insights and helps you stay focused, manage your network, and work smarter.

What is MyAnalytics?

Microsoft MyAnalytics, formerly known as Delve Analytics, is an application designed by Microsoft to help employees and their employers gain insight into how workers spend their time, with the goal to optimize daily tasks and make them more effectual. Its a part of the Office 365 cloud-based suite of productivity applications. This application can track data such as the time spent in meetings, time spent sharing emails, and time spent working late.

MyAnalytics is not new – it has just been buried within the Delve application. When you click the icon for My Analytics on your dashboard, it will take you to Delve, while the MyAnalytics option is in the sidebar on the right. Microsoft has just made the setting more visible and easier to access.

What is delve in office 365?

Delve was a file hub, collaboration space and enterprise social network built using Microsoft Graph and included in Microsoft 365. At the Ignite conference in 2016, Microsoft announced that they were renaming “Delve Analytics” to “MyAnalytics.” Delve Analytics was then broken down into Delve and MyAnalytics.

Microsoft introduced Delve in 2014. Watch this small intro to familiarize yourself with Delve. 

Delve is an experience within Microsoft 365 that surfaces relevant content and insights tailored to each person. It is powered by Office Graph, an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to map the connections between people, content and interactions that occur across Microsoft 365.

Delve plays a key role by unlocking the valuable knowledge held by everyone in an organization and makes it easy for people to discover and build upon the work and expertise of others.

With the easy search and discovery capabilities of Delve, you can learn a lot about a coworker before a meeting, keep up on your new assignments, and stay in the loop on the latest updates from your team. Delve brings the right information to you proactively, saving you the time you used to spend riffling through email threads, asking around or looking for documents. With this, you can discover what you need right when you need it.

Here are some features of Delve that you might be interested in.

Features & Benefits of MyAnalytics

Explore your work patterns with MyAnalytics and learn ways to work smarter by improving your focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration. It offers a range of features such as:

Benefits include:

A Walk-through of The MyAnalytics Dashboard

If you enjoy being productive and balanced, the new experience is one that you would enjoy. The personalized dashboard provides valuable insights into how to increase focus, achieve work-life balance, and improve your work relationships and team collaboration.

The Dashboard

Go to myanalytics.microsoft.com to open your personal MyAnalytics dashboard.

So, the dashboard opens to the home page that presents the statistics about my work patterns over the past month. This includes my focus and collaboration time, the number of days that I was able to disconnect from work, and how effectively I have been networking with my coworkers.

Focus

The Focus hours section helped me understand whether I have enough time for uninterrupted individual work and provides tips on how to protect my calendar and manage distractions. The insights on the page are basically based on my recent activity in Office 365. When I select View Suggestions, it produces ideas about how I can improve my current work pattern, for instance, booking focus time in my calendar and muting notifications when I’m trying to concentrate.

Wellbeing

The Wellbeing section shows how well I'm disconnecting from work during my time off and suggests ways to reduce stress and burnout. Quiet days measure the number of days where I didn't have any significant collaboration outside of my work hours. This collaboration includes sending and reading email messages, responding to chats, or attending calls and meetings in more than a one-hour period outside of my working hours. Weekends are considered all-day quiet email hours and are included in the Quiet day's calculation because they are opportunities to recharge from work for a full day. This section also provides you with wellbeing tips.

For instance, if my work schedule is set from 10 AM to 6 PM, Monday through Friday, and I participate in meetings, emails, chats, or calls after 6 on Monday, or on a weekend, Monday (or the weekend day) won't count as a quiet day.

Network

The Network section showed information about my relationships with the people in my network, based on my work activities over the past year. It also gave me suggestions on how to improve connections with my most important contacts, such as my manager. The insights on the Network page are based on my recent activity at work. When I select “View Suggestions,” it gives me ideas about how I might want to change or improve my current network pattern.

Collaboration

So the Collaboration tab helps you reflect on how effectively you spend your time in meetings, email, chats, and calls. The Weekly average section, moreover, measures a percentage of my work week based on the activity within my set working hours as configured in Outlook. It will also display and rate your top Collaborators, and active collaborators.

Productivity Insights

Office 365 MyAnalytics gives you insight into emails, your work patterns around focus, network, wellbeing, and collaboration over the past four weeks. These insights also show observations and trends of your most recent work habits based on your Office 365 data. These insights are visible on your dashboard home page as well as on the specific outcome pages. When you click on “View Suggestions,” you would see research-based recommendations on how to improve your work patterns. It will also show you your meeting hours.

How To Turn Off MyAnalytics

All Microsoft users can use the MyAnalytics dashboard to opt-out. When you opt out the following changes would occur:

Accessing MyAnalytics from Outlook

The add-on in Exchange online is an automatic installation that comes with the purchase of a plan. When you open MyAnalytics, you should be able to see an "Insights" icon on the top right on the home ribbon in Outlook. By choosing the icon, you can see insights for emails, after hours work, an option to add contacts, an option to book focus time, set task reminders and an option to see a list of shared OneDrive and SharePoint documents.

Removing the MyAnalytics 'Insights' icon from Outlook

At any time, you will, you can choose to opt-out of it as a whole or choose to opt-out of it in segmented parts. You would still have the option to opt back in later. To remove the insights icon, and therefore the Outlook add-on, you would need to open your dashboard and select the settings icon located on the top right of the page. Select settings under MyAnalytics, then click "Insights Outlook add-in." From here, you should be able to turn the MyAnalytics add-in option off.

Configuration

Once you or your IT administrator have assigned licenses to your users, IT will determine how these features will be made available. Office 365 currently offers three options: Opt-In, Opt-out and excluded. Usually, not all features are provided to all users while in some cases, your company may want to perform a test involving only a subset of users. You can find out in detail about the configuration of MyAnalytics in this article by Microsoft.

A Review on MyAnalytics

As someone who’s all for productivity and would love to keep track of the time I spend doing various tasks at work, I was super hyped to try out the MyAnalytics app myself and I just found my new favorite app to keep balance between work and home. It very easy to use and really, who doesn’t like seeing how well they’re doing at work?

NASCAR – Client Review on MyAnalytics

NASCAR moves fast both on and off the track. The NASCAR staff can now take a step back and make sure they're using their most valuable resource - time - as effectively as possible.

Here’s how NASCAR is using MyAnalytics for innovation.

The Shortcomings

One thing that I would call a snag or a downside to both these platforms is that MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics both focus on email and calendar data but fail to look at other areas of activity within Office 365. The Analysis these two platforms provide only includes the time spent on Skype calls if it is in your calendar. Moreover, it ignores the time composing an article like this one I’m working on in Word, even if I save it on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint. Any collaboration in Teams or Yammer is also outside the current boundary for analysis.

Given the circumstances, it's a promising solution that ensures productivity, all the while taking your health into account. The development team has refocused their efforts to deliver more personal insights through the Outlook add-in. Where this add-on used to focus on reporting how quickly recipients read email, now it looks for potential issues like conflicting meetings or unanswered email and flags them to the user. Of course, it is entirely up to you whether you take any note of this advice.

Office 365 MyAnalytics - Pricing

My analytics only comes with an Office 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan.

MyAnalytics vs Workplace Analytics

As discussed in detail, MyAnalytics for Office 365 uses the data from Outlook to analyze how many hours you’ve spent in meetings, emailing people, the time you’ve spent working, and the time you spend working outside of normal working hours. These insights allow you to prioritize your time and be productive. On the contrary, geared enterprises, Workplace Analytics operates at a company-wide scale. For instance, you may have found out that your five hundred employees spend an average of 6 hours a week in meetings, but another one of your department employees spends 14 hours a week at meetings. This insight could help you optimize that department.

You can buy Workplace Analytics as an add-on to Office 365 E3 for $6 per user/month, while with Office 365 E5, it costs $2 per user/month.

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