As the pandemic forced millions of people to work from home, many of us found ourselves spending more time in video meetings and in our inboxes as a way to bridge the distance from our colleagues. When the workplace became the living room or the makeshift home office, and as professional and personal responsibilities sometimes collided, we had to find new ways to manage time and attention and to sustain human connection. 

When it comes to work emails during the pandemic, we were sending more of them, to more recipients, and we often sent them outside of normal business hours. A study conducted by the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School assessed email statistics eight weeks before the start of the pandemic-related lockdowns and eight weeks after. The study concluded that after lockdowns, employees sent 5.2% more emails a day, emails had 2.9% more recipients, and about 8.3% more emails were sent after business hours. 

Many of the latest Google Workspace features are designed to help people save time, find focus, and manage tasks more efficiently, whether it’s with smarter emails, writing suggestions, Google Assistant, segmentable working hours, or predictive search. These features combine to save the equivalent of a full working month every year, per person, so that you can spend more time on what matters instead of managing tools. 

With that in mind, let’s take a deeper look at how Gmail can help you better manage time and attention.

1. Use dynamic email to help recipients complete tasks directly inside an email message. With the new dynamic email support in Gmail, you can easily send and receive emails that enable the reader to take action directly from within the message. This removes the burden of opening multiple documents and tabs. Email recipients can grant access to Drive files, respond to or resolve comments in Docs, Slides, or Sheets, and RSVP to events—all without leaving the message. Learn more.

2. Stay productive, even when you’re offline. Gmail Offline lets you read, reply, delete, and search your Gmail messages when you’re not connected to the internet. Once you set it up, an outbox will appear in the left panel. When a connection later becomes available, Gmail will automatically send the messages from your outbox, and download any new messages to your inbox. This is great for those working on the frontlines who need to stay productive and informed, even when they’re offline. 

3. Get organized and prioritize your work with Tasks in Gmail. This feature allows you to easily convert emails into tasks with just one click. You can create due dates that will automatically appear in your calendar, and check tasks off as you complete them. Baked directly into the side panel, you can create, view and manage your task lists without leaving Gmail.

4. Spend time innovating, not writing emails. Gmail’s template functionality lets you create standardized email messages that can be edited and sent out to different recipients in a matter of seconds. If this feature sounds appealing, check out Smart Reply and Smart Compose to learn more ways to write and reply to emails faster.

5. Get search results faster in Gmail. Search chips help you find what you’re looking for in Gmail faster, without needing to sort through irrelevant results or use search operators (e.g., from: marketing@company.com). For example, you can search a colleague’s name and further narrow your results by selecting search chips like attachment type (Doc, Sheet, PDF, etc.) or a specific timeframe. You can even exclude specific keywords and calendar invites from your results. You can also use search chips to search your Google Chat history, directly from within Gmail. To use search chips, all you need to do is type in a Gmail search, click on the search filter chips below the search box and Gmail will take care of the rest.

6. Tune out the irrelevant with the Gmail mute feature. Because we’ve all found ourselves trapped in unnecessary email threads, we created the Gmail Mute feature. With two clicks, you can mute email threads that aren’t relevant or that you no longer wish to follow. All future responses to that thread will now be automatically muted so you can focus your attention elsewhere. If you decide to rejoin the conversation, you can unmute the email thread just as easily.

As business leaders evaluate their hybrid work models, employee productivity is top of mind. They’re trying to understand how to balance organizational needs for productivity with employee needs for autonomy, flexibility, and work/life balance. In my role as Google’s Productivity Advisor, I help organizations and employees realize that being productive means working smartly and efficiently — not overworking. And one key to productivity is developing strong time management skills.

Recent research found that 82% of workers don’t have a proper time management system, however. Instead, they rely on making lists, referencing their inbox, or simply winging it. And the result is telling: 21% of people say “their work is never under control or only under control one day per week.”

Everyone works differently, and one of the best things about hybrid work is that it empowers people to work in their own way, at their own pace. However, if your employees are managing their time inefficiently over the long term, their risk of burnout increases — which can be bad news for employee wellbeing, morale and productivity.

In order for any hybrid work plan to be effective and your teams to be healthy, your employees need to build their time management muscle. You can help them do so with a three-step process:

1. Understand how your employees are currently managing their time
2. Encourage your employees to identify time management strengths and areas for improvement
3. Empower your employees to maximize their time management practices

Step 1: Understanding your employees’ work habits

Before you can help your employees manage their time more effectively, you first need to understand how they spend it. To start, identify habits that might be preventing your employees from establishing productive workflows. For example, some employees might be working too much outside of business hours or spending the majority of their working hours in meetings.

While observation may help you glean some of this information, it’s best to go straight to the source. To find out if your employees feel they’re managing their time efficiently, simply ask them! You can distribute an anonymous questionnaire using a survey tool, like Google Forms, with questions like:

• Are you having trouble getting all your work done?
• Do you feel like you have enough independent working time?
• Do alerts and notifications interrupt or enhance your workflow?
• Which productivity and collaboration tools do you find the most and the least useful?
• How do you communicate best with your coworkers when working on- and off-site?

One major hurdle to effective time management can be too many meetings. To learn if meeting fatigue is plaguing your teams, include a survey question asking employees if they feel like they devote too much time to meetings. Help them get specific by encouraging them to use a tool like Time Insights. With this feature, employees can see exactly how much time they spend in meetings and how much focus time they schedule each week to accurately answer your survey.

Fielding an anonymous questionnaire is a great way to start your time management audit. The learnings that emerge can help you identify patterns in your workplace and among your teams — but they won’t reveal how individual employees work. For that, you’ll need to reach out to them directly.

Step 2: Identifying individual strengths to harness and areas for improvement

Once you have a general idea of how your team works, you can dig deeper into your individual employees’ time management methods and working styles. With this information, you can then help them identify the practices that work — and don’t work — for them.

Suggest to your employees that they spend a week observing their productivity patterns and time management methods. You might encourage people to look at:

• Their level of energy at different times during the day and/or on different days of the week
• The different types of work, such as strategic or administrative, they like doing and when
• How much time they spend doing work versus communicating about work
• How they feel during and after group meetings
• The amount of time they spend in deep-focus versus time spent switching among different tasks

If your organization uses digital timesheets, your employees can consult built-in, automatic time-tracking insights to see where they’re spending their time. Otherwise, you can easily create a custom time-tracking app using a no-code solution like AppSheet to help your employees measure the time they devote to their various responsibilities.

Once everyone has completed their weeklong study, set up dedicated meetings to review your employees’ observations with them individually. Armed with this new understanding, you and your employees can clarify when and how each person does their best work, identify areas for improvement, and start adjusting accordingly.

Step 3: Empowering your employees to flex their time management muscle

Now that you have clarity on how your employees spend their time, you can work with them to develop personal time management practices. To set them up for success, look for opportunities that take advantage of their strengths and offset their challenges — no matter how they like to work.

It’s important to remember there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to using time productively. Some workers love to tackle the most difficult tasks first thing in the morning; others feel more energized at the end of their day. Some people think best in conversation while others prefer to be alone with their thoughts. To help your employees develop time management practices that fit their working style, they need to feel empowered to decide how they can use their time and tools productively.

When it comes to time management, calendars are your best friend, so encourage your employees to take advantage of simple features. Google Calendar lets everyone see availability; by glancing at a shared calendar, coworkers will know when to reach out to someone (and when not to). You can also prompt your employees to block off quiet time during windows when they feel most productive, and use tools like Focus time to protect the time they need for heads-down work.

Email and chat are important, but they can also become a distraction if not used intentionally. Most people open email first thing in the morning, leave it open all day, and check it often. Instead, when you and your employees need to focus, try closing the email tab or using Gmail features to snooze and star emails to stay on task. The same approach applies to chat: check it strategically and turn off notifications when you need deep focus.

Finally, be intentional about building and maintaining trust with your teams as they develop new time management skills. If you decide to use Google Meet for regular check-ins, partner with your employees to develop meeting agendas directly inside Calendar invites to ensure your shared time will be used efficiently.

Valuing impact over output

Hybrid work offers an opportunity for business leaders to rethink their perspective on employee time management and what it means to be productive. Remember, the goal of building effective time management skills isn’t always to become more efficient so one can take on additional work. Often times, taking a step back helps us simplify how we work in order to deepen our impact. When you empower your employees to create a personal time management system, I think you’ll find they will be happier and healthier, with more to contribute to your organization.

Environmental sustainability is a key priority for TELUS, a world-leading communications technology company. It continues to rank in the top 100 most sustainably managed companies in the world, and seeks to make a healthier planet for all by leveraging its global-leading technology, compassion to drive social change and reduce our collective carbon footprint through innovative technologies and sustainable business practices.

TELUS surpassed its sustainability objectives in 2019 and is now on a journey to procure all of its electricity from renewable or low-emitting sources by 2025. Next, it aims to achieve net carbon neutrality for its operations by 2030. TELUS has also been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for 21 consecutive years, a feat unmatched by any other North American telecom or cable company. In 2021, it became the first company in Canada to release a Sustainability-linked bond (SLB) framework and complete an SLB offering, formally linking TELUS financing to its environmental performance.

“We’ve spent the last decade becoming a global leader in sustainability, helping make the planet healthier by ensuring that our operations are as environmentally responsible as possible,” said Geoff Pegg, Head of Sustainability and Environment at TELUS.

In part, TELUS’ strategy is focused on three key areas:

1. Seek the best renewable energy options available
2. Focus on migrating workloads to the cloud
3. Embrace a multiplier effect through the use of sustainable partners

Renewable energy impact

Part of this environmental responsibility involves investing heavily in renewable energy sources through power purchase agreements (PPAs) that help renewable energy providers like wind farms and solar companies develop their infrastructure. TELUS executed PPAs with four Alberta-based solar and wind facilities to provide 100 per cent of its electricity load demand in a province where one-third of the grid is powered by coal.

As a technology company, electricity represents a large portion of TELUS’ energy needs: 80 percent of the operational carbon footprint comes from the power requirements for TELUS’ network and administrative buildings, Pegg explains. While TELUS is using renewable energy sources and low-emitting energy grids to power its buildings and network, there’s also the often-forgotten part of the carbon emissions equation: the energy it takes to power data centers. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, data centers represent 1 percent of the global electricity demand and that figure is expected to keep rising as the world increases usage of data-heavy technologies.

“It’s probably no surprise that everyone, whether you’re a business or a consumer, is concerned about reducing carbon emissions,” said Chris Talbott, the Google Cloud Sustainability Lead. “A lot of us think about the carbon emissions associated with our cars or with the electricity that powers our homes, but oftentimes we forget about the carbon emissions that come from the digital services that we use or the networks required to deliver that data.”

As a leader in sustainability, how can TELUS meet the energy demands of its customers while also protecting the environment? One way is through the company’s previously announced collaboration with Google Cloud. The two companies are working together to build a more sustainable world through technology and reduce TELUS’ carbon footprint, create value along the entire supply chain, and optimize industry solutions for social impact through data analytics and machine learning.

Taking a cloud first approach — reducing carbon emissions with green cloud computing

Google became carbon neutral in 2007 and has achieved 100 per cent renewable energy matching every year since 2017. Google has invested in renewable energy to match the electricity we use across our entire operations, including Google Cloud, meaning every workload that TELUS runs on Google Cloud has been matched with renewable energy purchases.

“The operational carbon footprint of running anything on Google Cloud is zero,” Talbott said. Also, by working with Google, TELUS gets the benefit of economies of scale using less electricity. Not only is TELUS leveraging Google data centers, it’s also relying on the digital collaboration made possible by Google Workspace to reduce the amount of travel required by employees attending meetings in different offices. Collaboration tools like Google Meet can reduce the carbon footprint of in-person conferences by 94 percent.

Google compensates for the environmental footprint of any electricity used in the data center and out to the edge network. “You can feel pretty good about using Google Meet because it’s carbon-neutral,” Talbott said.

Multiplier through sustainable partnerships — green cloud computing radiates out

By supporting TELUS in its environmental sustainability efforts, Google Cloud is also enabling TELUS to do the same for its various partnerships. For example, powered by Google Cloud’s infrastructure and data analytics capabilities, TELUS is partnering with Picacity (formerly NXN Digital) and Google Cloud to deliver an ecosystem of integrated smart technologies that enable cities to improve the lives of their residents.

From dynamic traffic signaling that reduces congestion and emissions, to data analytics that create smarter, more efficient city planning, the partnership is transforming the way municipalities operate in our increasingly digital world.The partnership is built on four foundational pillars of infrastructure and environmental sustainability, intelligent transportation, public safety and security, and health. In the case of intelligent transportation, this means sensors, cameras, and other devices are built into or near roads, sidewalks, and bike paths to provide data for innovative software to improve traffic flow in real time. The data can then foster informed decisions about infrastructure, city planning, fleet optimization, and public safety.

All of these environmental measures may seem small when compared with the enormity of the problem that is climate change, but as Talbott said, “Change begins with the small decisions we make every day such as paying attention to the practices of companies that we’ve come to rely on daily in the modern world. They may seem small and in the margins, but at scale, this is how we can make a real impact.”