My smart assistant for my stress-free work life.
My Life Before My Smart Assistant
Before I adopted my smart assistant, I was constantly checking my emails, tempted to reply to them as soon as I read them with minimum thinking time, spending Sundays to prepare for Mondays…and so on. Surprisingly, I didn’t even realize this was not a stress-free work life. It was just normal till I got introduced to my smart assistant.
So, Who Is My Smart Assistant?
First, in full transparency, I have no shares or investment in my smart assistant. I am sharing my personal experience with you all so that we can all start seeing these new GenAI tools from a new perspective.
So, CoPilot is my new smart assistant that helps me with various tasks, such as summarizing emails, providing insights on the analytics dashboard, preparing for meetings, etc. It is not just a tool, but a companion that makes my life easier and happier. In this document, I will share how CoPilot has improved my mental health in different aspects.
Reducing Stress
One of the benefits of my smart assistant is that I don’t have to spend hours on Google, searching for information and filtering out irrelevant results. CoPilot can do the research for me and provide me with concise and relevant summaries which gives me a starting point. This saves me time and energy and allows me to focus on the thinking and strategizing for my approach to solve the problem. Of course, I have to be a subject matter expert in the area to ensure that the information provided to me by CoPilot is relevant, and accurate.
Another source of stress for me is checking my email constantly. I used to worry about missing important messages or forgetting to reply to someone. CoPilot solves this problem by giving me a list of emails in Teams. It summarizes the email thread which saves me from reading multiple emails so I get the gist of the conversations rather than trying to scroll down to figure out who said what in the thread. It is handy after 4 weeks of vacation. Can you imagine going through thousands of emails when you are back from a relaxing vacation? Now, I don’t have to spend my last day of vacation catching up on emails. On my first day back, I use CoPilot to get a summary of emails and summaries of threads, or any documents shared with me. I am up and running in 2-4 hours which saves me a week of reading emails or asking people to re-send me the email if it is urgent. I have actually uninstalled Outlook on my phone…and I am surviving without it… stress free. Now, of course CoPilot doesn’t tell me about every email, but I have accepted that fact for now. I am ok with not knowing about every email that’s landed in my inbox when I wake up in the morning or when I am on vacation. I must accept this fact to make peace with my smart assistant.
Fostering Positivity
Have you ever come across your emotions when reading emails or participating in meetings, and you really want to say, “what the hell are you thinking?” Well, we all have.
So, my smart assistant also helps me refine my responses to emails and chats by articulating my message to the reader/listener in a neutral or positive tone. I have done it over so many weeks now that it has actually trained my brain to think positively when I am asking for clarifications or replying to emails. Unconsciously, my brain has a mental note to re-write my response in a positive tone. I don’t think there is any leadership or communication training that can do that to your brain. We all fall back into our default styles after those trainings.
Enhancing Productivity
Remember a time when you got a pre-read just before the meeting and it is a very critical meeting to make an informed decision? If you are like me who likes to be prepared for the meeting so that we can all move forward and support the project teams to carry out their work effectively and efficiently without having further meetings, then last-minute pre-reads are not good enough for you. When I get pre-reads now, I just ask CoPilot to summarize the document for me, highlight gaps in the document, questions to ask, etc. This enhances not only my productivity but also boosts my satisfaction. I don’t have to worry about missing meetings or being unprepared.
If I am late to a meeting or double-booked, then my smart assistant gives me the summary of what was discussed and decided when I join the meeting. I used to listen to the meeting recordings that I missed to ensure I am up to date with the conversation, stay on top of my projects and contribute effectively. It used to take so much of my time. Now, CoPilot recaps the meeting, summarizes the meeting notes, highlights key takeaways and decisions which is so helpful when I am listening to the actual recording on double speed. I wish we had 3x speed in Microsoft Stream.
Time to Think
As professionals, we are constantly influencing others and selling ideas through PowerPoint. You are in back-to-back meetings going through slide deck after slide deck, but still, when you ask questions to the presenter, not all the details are hashed out. I always wondered why people didn’t have all the details when presenting. To understand this, I started observing my own behaviour. I realized that I was so focused on the format and flow of the presentation that I wasn’t investing into thinking about all the details. On top of it, I am a 1-slide person. That means I am leaving a lot of details out for those who like details.
So, I changed my behaviour. I started writing my thoughts in a word document. Everything and anything, brain dump in the word document. Now, you must be wondering that I wasted my time to write a word document and then more time to create a slide deck. Answer is “No”. I saved weeks and weeks by doing this. First, I am very clear about my thoughts and how to provide information in a digestible manner to meet the preferences of my audience. Second, I have detailed documentation written for my team and other cross-functional teams who will work with me, and most importantly, if anyone wants to read the details to support the narrative in the slide deck, then I have it. I don’t have to prepare for it after the meeting. Third, once I have the document ready, I can ask my smart assistant to create a PowerPoint. CoPilot creates the slides with images in it and applies layouts as per the content theme in a blink. Then, in PowerPoint, I can ask CoPilot to re-organize the slides, summarize the slides, and my favorite, add an executive summary. I don’t have to spend hours looking for the perfect image, layout, flow or typing; my smart assistant does all that for me. I even ask CoPilot to create images based on my thoughts.
I can write a procedure from a slide deck or create a slide deck from a word document now. Imagine your leader asks you to have a slide deck ready in an hour, and you say, “check your inbox, it’s already done.” Sounds like a dream, right?
Think Mental Wellness When You Think of GenAI
For me, CoPilot is more than a smart assistant, it is a friend that cares about my mental wellness. It reduces my stress, prompts a positive mindset, enhances my productivity, and makes me happier. I am grateful for GenAI innovation, and I recommend anyone who has a fear of GenAI to think differently and try to adopt it as per their personal preference. The key is to train your brain, not to train GenAI. Remember, it is at the infancy stage and needs instructions like a baby, so learn prompting.