Microsoft Briefing overview
The Briefing email helps you stay in control of your calendar and be intentional about your day. Within the first two hours of your workday (as set up in Outlook), you’ll get an email about any relevant items to help you better prepare for the day ahead, including:
- Outstanding commitments, requests, and follow-ups to and from other collaborators in email that might have fallen through the cracks.
- Documents related to today’s meetings that you might want to review beforehand.
- Suggested focus time you can schedule to help get independent work done.
The briefing email is received within the first two hours of each workday (per your Outlook Calendar Work time settings) when you have actionable tasks or meetings that day. You won’t get a Briefing email on a day without actionable tasks or when you’re not working, such as a weekend day.
If you are a M365 administrator, you can configure briefing emails for your organization members by following instructions at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/briefing/be-admin
How it works
The Briefing email looks for actionable tasks in Outlook and includes the top results in the email. If these tasks are related to any upcoming meetings, they’ll be listed in context with the meeting. Meetings will also have links to any attached or potentially related documents.
The Adaptive version of the Briefing email also includes any last-minute options to schedule time to focus on deep work or to work through any of the tasks included in the email. Any existing focus time that’s already scheduled is also referenced in this section.
For each task, you can select:
- Not a task to remove it from your current list of tasks. It will also be excluded from all future Briefing emails. This valuable feedback will improve future task identification.
- Done to indicate the task is complete.
For documents, select:
- Done to indicate you are finished reviewing the document.
- Not related to remove the document suggestion and gives feedback that helps improve future.
Using the Briefing email
Depending on if you open the Adaptive or HTML version, the Briefing email includes the following sections:
- Prepare for today’s meetings
- Tasks you need to follow up on
- Make the most of your focus time (Adaptive version only)
If you want to unsubscribe from the briefing emails, select Unsubscribe near the end of your Briefing email to opt out of future Briefing emails.
Privacy considerations
You should review all privacy considerations related to Microsoft Briefing before rolling this feature out in your organization. Details can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/briefing/be-privacy
