I write a lot on this blog about using AI to build things - apps, infrastructure, tooling. This post is about the other end of the spectrum: the unglamorous weekly admin that nobody enjoys but everybody has to do. Timesheets. Status updates. Answering “so what’s actually happened on this project?” when you’ve been heads-down for a fortnight.
It turns out Microsoft 365 Copilot, powered by Work IQ, is genuinely good at this stuff - and I don’t think enough people are using it this way.
First, what’s Work IQ?#
Work IQ is the intelligence layer that sits underneath Microsoft 365 Copilot. In plain terms, it’s what gives Copilot an understanding of your working life - your emails, your meetings, your Teams chats, the documents you’ve touched, who you work with and what you’re working on. It’s the difference between asking a generic chatbot a question and asking something that actually knows what you did on Tuesday.
That context is the whole trick. Copilot without Work IQ knows about the world; Copilot with Work IQ knows about your world. And that’s exactly what you need for the two scenarios below.
Scenario one: the dreaded timesheet#
I’ll be honest - I am terrible at filling in timesheets as I go. I always intend to, and then it’s Friday afternoon and I’m staring at an empty week trying to remember what I did on Monday morning.
This is where Copilot earns its keep. Because Work IQ can see your calendar, your meetings, your emails and your chats, you can ask it to reconstruct your week for you. My go-to prompt looks something like this:
“Look at my calendar, meetings, emails and Teams activity for this week and build me a day-by-day summary of what I worked on. Group it by project or client, and estimate roughly how much time went on each. Present it as a table.”
What comes back isn’t a finished timesheet - and I’ll come back to that - but it’s a shockingly good first draft. It’ll pick up the meetings you attended, the threads you were active in, the documents you were editing, and stitch them into “Monday: mostly Project X - design review meeting, follow-up email thread on the API changes, worked on the architecture doc.”
A few things I’ve learned to make this work better:
- Ask for the output in the shape your timesheet system wants. If you book time in half-day blocks against project codes, say so in the prompt. The less reformatting you do afterwards, the better.
- Do it weekly, not monthly. Copilot’s reconstruction of this week is very good. Its reconstruction of three weeks ago is fuzzier, and so is yours - so you can’t sanity-check it properly.
- Always review it before you submit. This is the important one. Copilot sees your digital activity. It doesn’t see the two hours you spent thinking on a whiteboard, the phone call that wasn’t in Teams, or the fact that a meeting titled “Project X sync” was actually forty minutes of Project Y. Treat the output as a memory aid, not a source of truth - especially if your timesheets drive client billing.
Even with the review step, this has turned a twenty-minute Friday chore into about three minutes. Over a year, that’s real time back.
Scenario two: “What’s happened on this project in the last two weeks?”#
This one is even better, and it’s the prompt I show people when I want to convince them Copilot is worth having.
Maybe you’ve been on holiday. Maybe you’ve been buried in a different workstream. Maybe a stakeholder has just asked for an update and you need to sound like you’ve been paying attention. Either way, the prompt is simple:
“Summarise everything that’s happened on Project X over the last two weeks. Look across my emails, Teams chats, meetings and shared documents. Break it down into: key decisions made, work completed, open issues and risks, and anything that needs my attention or has a deadline coming up.”
Work IQ does the heavy lifting here - it knows which conversations, meetings and documents relate to the project, and Copilot pulls them together into one coherent picture. Decisions that were made in a meeting you missed. A risk that got raised in a chat thread you weren’t tagged in. The document that quietly went through three rounds of review while you were away.
Some variations I use regularly:
- The return-from-leave version: “I’ve been off for two weeks. What do I need to know? What emails and threads actually need a response from me, and what can I ignore?” - honestly life-changing for the first morning back.
- The stakeholder version: “Turn that summary into a short status update I can send to the project sponsor - keep it to five bullet points, plain English, no jargon.”
- The accountability version: “What did I commit to doing in meetings over the last two weeks, and have I done it?” - slightly terrifying, highly recommended.
Other tips worth passing on#
A few more things I’ve found myself showing colleagues, all powered by the same Work IQ context:
Meeting prep in one prompt. Before a meeting, ask “What do I need to know before my 2pm? Summarise previous meetings in this series, recent related emails, and anything outstanding from last time.” Walking in properly prepped with three minutes of effort changes how meetings go.
Recap meetings you didn’t attend. If a meeting was recorded or transcribed, you can ask for the decisions and actions without watching a second of it. Stop attending meetings “just to stay in the loop” - let Copilot be the loop.
Draft in your own voice. Copilot has seen how you write. When you ask it to draft an email or an update, ask it to match your usual tone - the output needs far less editing than you’d expect.
Prep for your one-to-ones. “What have I accomplished since my last one-to-one with my manager? What’s blocked?” - great for making sure the things you actually did get talked about, rather than just whatever’s on fire that day.
Ask it what you’ve forgotten. My favourite Friday prompt: “Based on my emails and meetings this week, is there anything I’ve said I’d do that I haven’t followed up on?” It has caught genuinely embarrassing things before they became embarrassing.
The caveats#
It wouldn’t be an honest post without these:
- Copilot only knows what’s in Microsoft 365. If your project lives in Jira, GitHub and a stand-up that nobody minutes, the picture will have gaps. The more your work flows through Teams, Outlook and shared documents, the better this all works.
- It respects permissions - which cuts both ways. Copilot can only surface content you already have access to. That’s exactly what you want from a security point of view, but it means your summary is your view of the project, not necessarily the whole project.
- Review before it leaves your hands. Whether it’s a timesheet or a sponsor update, the responsibility for accuracy is still yours. Copilot is a brilliant first-draft machine; it is not an excuse.
Final thoughts#
The building-things side of AI gets all the attention - and fair enough, it’s the fun bit. But for most people in most organisations, the admin side is where the hours actually leak away: reconstructing your week for a timesheet, piecing together what happened while you were looking elsewhere, writing the same status update in three formats for three audiences.
Microsoft 365 Copilot with Work IQ quietly takes most of that off your plate. It’s not flashy. Nobody’s going to write a keynote about your timesheet. But three minutes instead of twenty, every single week, across everything above? That adds up to something worth having.
If you’ve got a Copilot licence and you’ve only been using it to summarise documents, try the timesheet prompt this Friday. Let me know how you get on - I’d love to hear what prompts you’re using.
