Work Smarter: Copilot Productivity Tips for Planning Events

[GabeHo]

September tends to bring many back into the flow of work, drawing Summer (or Winter, if you're in the Southern hemisphere) to a close. Here, the faint scent of spiced coffee in the air is also a reminder that we’re fast approaching the holiday season - a critical time for businesses to launch offers and events to entice customers and generate sales.



September is thus a perfect time to get plotting, and a strong workback schedule can be incredibly helpful in ensuring that you’re focusing your time and activities to maximum effect. Your day is already packed and there aren’t moments to waste.



Today, let’s explore how Copilot in Loop can help you with project management to keep you and your team organized and on track, whatever the moment.



Tip 1: Create a good prompt

Prompting should be like having a conversation, using plain, clear language and providing context like you would with an assistant. But being clear on what you are trying to achieve. For simplicity, think of a prompt has having 4 primary ingredients:

An image breaking down the 4 primary ingredients of a prompt: the Goal, Context, Source, and Expectation

These core ingredients, applied to any prompt you might give Copilot, should help Copilot provide you with much better responses. To learn more about prompting fundamentals, check this out.



Tip 2: Create a workback schedule using Copilot in Loop

If you’re unfamiliar with it, Microsoft Loop is a fantastic tool included in Microsoft 365 Business Standard and up, that can take collaboration to the next level by simplifying content sharing and co-creation.



To begin, create a new Loop page and open Copilot by selecting the “Set up your page with Copilot” button at the bottom.

An image of the Copilot pane in Loop



In this example, I’m going to put in the prompt:



“I want to hold a big in-person marketing event on December 20 that would kick off a holiday sale for my new line of products. Please create a workback schedule for me that tracks actions I should take to get ready for the event. Put them in a table with sections, and make columns for action, responsible owner, progress, and next steps.”



In seconds, I now have a great start to an event plan that I can then fine tune with my specific activities and use to make sure I’m organized and focused on tasks that work towards my goal.

An image of a workback schedule that Copilot generated, outlining tasks I need to complete at timeline milestones before an event



Tip 3: Share the plan and collaborate easily

I can invite collaboration in a number of different ways. Selecting Share on the top right, I can choose to share this page as a Loop component.

An image of the Share menu in Microsoft Loop, to show sharing a Loop component

I can then paste the component into an email or Teams chat, allowing others to seamlessly edit and collaborate without needed to ever go into the Loop page itself.



An image of a Loop component pasted in an email draft

These tips can be applied to just about anything you’d like to plan or collaborate on, whether it’s a marketing event, a holiday party, or business trip to meet customers.



I’d love to hear what other ways you might find this helpful to you!

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