Kirk Liemohn is a Principal Software Engineer at ThreeWill. He has spent nearly a decade helping clients transform and migrate their content from one platform to another (typically to Microsoft 365) with a focus on the more complex scenarios. Prior to his transformation focus, Kirk led several key SharePoint integrations at ThreeWill including Jive, Polycom, and Confluence.
Vacations are a great way to disconnect and unwind from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From time to time we need to recharge our batteries and enjoy a little R & R. Unfortunately, I don’t enjoy getting buried by email and messages when I come back. We hope that we have someone to handle our work while we are out, but the reality for many of us is that much of that work is waiting for us when we return.
At ThreeWill we are heavy users of Teams. That means that I really don’t get that many emails in a day. Yes, some of our client communications are through email – but even those are mostly through Teams as well. If you are not careful, you can get buried under Teams messages similar to how you can get buried under your emails if you are away for a couple of weeks too.
I took two weeks off in October to have a great trip overseas. I definitely did unplug most of the time I was there, but I knew that my first day back (or maybe even my first week back) was going to be quite painful if I didn’t stay plugged in from time to time.
Teams Messages Have Context
One of the many benefits of Teams over email is that your Teams messages have context around them. This could be comments on a document or simply a thread within a particular Team. Whereas email is just a big inbox (ok – some of you have special mail routing rules). With Teams, when you come back you can choose what you want to pay attention to (vs. just going through your inbox in chronological (or reverse chronological) order. For example, you may be on a couple of projects and one of them is at a more critical stage, so you might check in on that one first.
On the other hand, you can do what I did for this last vacation and just check in every day or two and mute some conversations that you know will be covered. Microsoft Teams works great on mobile whether you are in an airport, hotel, train, or Uber. I was able to use it to keep tabs on my peeps and delegate or handle critical issues that came up.
To be honest, there was plenty to catch up on when I came back, but I thought that Teams made it a lot easier to make that transition. If you don’t use Teams or think your organization could be better at using Teams, check out how ThreeWill can help!
CONTACT THREEWILL TO BRING THE BENEFITS OF TEAMS TO YOUR ORGANIZATION!