Using Viva Insights to Plan Time Away

Use the Plan your time away insight to reduce the stress of planning for upcoming time away from work. This checklist tool helps you:

• Resolve all your meetings in one place with a custom message about your scheduled time off.

• Compose your autoreplies and notify your team about your planned time off.

• Schedule focus time to wrap up tasks before you go and to catch up on work when you get back.

Plan your schedule with these options all at one time or individually as you get closer to the date. You can also come back at any time and change details before you go. Viva Insights will track your progress and update which actions are done.

1. In the Viva Insights add-in pane, go to the Plan your time away card.

2. Select Help me plan to get a checklist that contains the following planning options:

   1. Select dates – Set up an "Out of Office" appointment on your calendar for the selected dates:

      1. Select Start and End dates for when you'll be out of office.

      2. Select Schedule.

   2. Set automatic replies – Compose and save an out-of-office reply message for the dates you selected:

      1. Under Compose or edit message, keep with the default or edit your out-of-office reply.

         Note: If you composed a message for a previous out-off-office period, you'll notice the most recent message you used as the default in the Compose or edit message field.

      2. Select Send outside my organization to send the same message to people inside and outside your organization.

         Tip: If you want to send a different auto-reply message to people outside your organization, you can do that through Outlook: Settings> Mail> Automatic replies.

      3. Select Save.

   3. Notify collaborators – Notify people you've worked with in the last four weeks about your upcoming time away.  

      1. If you want to notify collaborators through an email, select Open new email draft, make changes, and Send.

      2. If you want to notify collaborators through a meeting invitation, select Open new meeting invitation, make changes, and Send.

   4. Resolve meetings – Decline or cancel meetings you organized or accepted for while you're away.

      1. Decline and cancel meetings with this message – Edit the message that Viva Insights will send to decline or cancel meeting invitations.

      2. Select meetings to decline and cancel – Select which meetings you want to decline or cancel, or use Select all to decline or cancel all the meetings listed. When you're done, select Confirm. You can also select Open next to a meeting to see more details about it.

   5. Book time to focus – Schedule time to focus on wrapping up work before you go, and then on catching up after you get back.

      1. Expand Review open slots.

      2. Select the plus sign (+) next to the available focus time slots you want to book.

      3. Select Done to add them to your calendar.

As a manager, you can use the Catch up with your team insight to:

• Act on tasks you promised to get done or that team members asked you to complete.

• Review important emails and documents from team members that you haven't read yet.