Microsoft Teams My Hub! (An Idea) - Will this be the next thing for Microsoft Teams?

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I spend my whole day in Microsoft Teams, whether that is attending meetings, accessing documents, demonstrating Teams to customers or working on documents with colleagues or customers and this got me thinking is there a gap within Teams around personal productivity?

We all know that Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork, but it also introduces many features and applications that can mean it becomes your hub for productivity. One area that I believe is missing is a single area for users to come within Teams to see everything that is important to them, maybe this is an expansion to the notification area or a completely new type of team.

I have been playing around with this idea myself and have found that a Team that I call “My Hub” has become one of my most important goto Teams that I use on a regular basis.

Microsoft Teams My Hub (Idea)

Inside this Team I have added a number of tabs that help me plan my day, manage workload and well-being as well as ensure that I catch-up on what is important to me. Now I wouldn’t recommend that these are rolled out to all users within an organisation today, I think that would require Microsoft to implement such a solution but maybe for a few individuals this would help.

I believe if implemented the users should get the option as to whether they wished to enable the “My Hub” feature that would in-turn create the My Hub team for them. This is a personal Team that doesn’t have the ability to add other users too. When enabled the user should be greeted with a simple wizard that allows the hub to be customised for the users needs quickly and easily.

Within MyHub I utilise the following tabs for my personal use cases

  • Posts - This is used as a constant journal or daily journal, this could be further customsied with daily prompts configured by the user

  • High Level Planner - Whilst I am a member of a number of plans I find it useful to use planner for high-level task planning for myself. I use a task management methodology similar to GTD or the CORD productivity model. As such I have a dedicated planner with the following buckets

    • Daily - As planner doesn’t allow repeating tasks I use this for daily checklist items

    • Today - This is where I move and add tasks that I need to work on today

    • Inbox - This is where I dump all the tasks I need to deal with before organising

    • Master Project List - This is where I store a high-level list of all the projects I am working on. I link to the URL of the relevant planner tab or team

    • Ideas - Does what it says on the tin, it’s where I store ideas before taking steps to act upon them

    • Reading Material - Material that I have found that I wish to review

    • Assigned Tasks - This is where I track at a high level the tasks I have delegated ready for 1:1’s

  • Email - I have added Outlook as a web tab within Teams, it’s not perfect and doesn’t stay logged in all the time but works well.

  • Daily Briefings - This is a specific folder with some Outlook rules to place the Cortana daily briefings in a quick rule

  • My Analytics - This allows me to quickly and easily act upon the guidance given both on an individual basis and for my team within Microsoft Teams

  • Headspace - Taken from the news that headspace is going to be integrated with Teams in the future I’ve added Headspace in a tab for now and I have quick and easy access to Headspace in Teams

  • Business Dashboard - Quick access to PowerBI or Web-based dashboards that are important to my role.

  • News Sites - I have a number of tabs with links to blogs and news sites I check on a regular basis, wouldn’t it be great if there was a new aggregator tab type!

  • Files - Whilst I haven’t been able to do this today, this could become a OneDrive tab, showing not only the files that are within your OneDrive but being the place to go to where you are able to see the files people have shared with you.

Microsoft Planner Example.png

As you can see this team brings together everything that is important to me in the same way your other Microsoft Teams should bring together everything that is important to the department or project for example. Microsoft are bringing a number of the elements I mention above into Teams through apps being rolled out such as Tasks but I believe a new type of personal Team such as My Hub would allow the users to truly create a customised area that would become their hub for productivity.

I would love to hear your thoughts and how you use Teams to manage your productivity.