I have spent time working on multiple projects for my employer today and one of the tools we use is Microsoft Teams. I discovered a serious flaw when it comes to multitasking with it. The interface does not lend itself to switching between multiple projects as easily as a web browser. It cost me a lot of productivity today and I need to remember that in the future.
When you are in a browser you can open up multiple tabs for different websites and keep them all open at the same time. If you see a link that you want to visit but don't want to navigate away from your existing site, right-click on the link and it pulls up another tab. I generally only have 5 tabs open at a time. After that it gets too confusing. I wish Microsoft Teams had something similar.
We store a lot of files in Microsoft Teams so that we can share them easily instead of passing them around in e-mail. They are stored in OneDrive but most people share the link in the chat feature. Today I had two different presentations I started working on within Teams. When I needed to make an update in the other presentation, I would go look for it and lose my place in the first presentation. Then to make matters worse, I would get a chat message and lose both presentations.
There are some workarounds that would have allowed me to keep both presentations open in different windows and still be able to answer chat messages. Unfortunately that requires a bit of preparation before starting to work on the presentations in Teams. By the time I figured out I tried to do too many things at once, I had already wasted a lot of time. In the future, when I go to work on a presentation found in Microsoft Teams, I will be sure to open it in the stand-alone PowerPoint application so I don't have to keep searching for it after interruptions. Hopefully this tip helps you if you are a Microsoft Teams user.
No comments:
Post a Comment