Using M365 Copilot on your 2026 Objectives
“People tend to overestimate how much they can do in a day and underestimate how much they can do in a year”
Many of us are now heading back to the workplace after a (hopefully) nice relaxing break with loved ones. With a new year comes new priorities and objectives, new ambitions and goals, and a load of new things to learn!
Sometimes it’s not clear how to approach a new work year - How do I take the learnings from last year, bring them together with my goals and ambitions for this year, and maximise the value and impact I deliver through my priorities and objectives?
I’ve been experimenting with M365 Copilot to get myself ready for 2026, to maximise the impact I can have in a year, and to achieve my goals, and I want to share it with you to see if it can help you too, or if you’ve got suggestions to further improve it!
This is what I have done… and what you could do too!
Process flow to describes what I’ve done to use M365 Copilot reactively and proactively
Learn from the Past
I wanted to take my learnings from 2025 to ensure I was building in my successes and my improvement areas and make sure they’re factored in to my 2026 plans so I printed a PDF describing my 2025 priorities, and one with the narrative that I submitted to describe my actions and performance against those priorities. I also printed PDFs of all the feedback I’d received through the year against those priorities, and other activities.
Set Direction for the Future
Although formal priorities haven’t been yet set I know that the general themes are likely to be the same so have used these and can refine them later… % use of my time on client work, my personal development, Fulfilling project delivery commitments, how I impact the capability and performance of our function, how I represent Capgemini externally at conferences and user groups, how I increase our number and size of opportunities and grow existing opportunities.
I’ve also been considering what my key ambitions are this year - For example the performance rating would I like to achieve at year end, and the position I’d like to be in with respect to grade level at end of year.
All of these elements then feed in to my plan.
Ground Copilot in your organisational context
I then needed to make sure that everything I’m extracting and then planning is aligned to my organisations frameworks, grading expectations and criteria, leadership expectations, so finding internal documents and links that provide this context.
I also needed to think about who some of my key stakeholders will be for the coming year… my people manager, senior leaders, senior leaders from other areas of the business who I’ll work with to ensure our combined success.
By doing this all within your M365 tenant Copilot will also have access to your documents, emails, calendar entries, meeting transcripts, Teams messages etc. This all provides not only additional organisational context but also we make sure that it’s proposals of plans, activities, or contacts, align with the specifics of your organisation’s processes.
Consolidate inputs in a M365 Copilot Notebook
Microsoft describe Copilot Notebooks as “your own AI-powered workspace designed for the content that matters most to your task. Bring together all your relevant resources including Copilot Chat, files, pages, meeting notes, links, and more in one place.”
I’ve called my Copilot Notebook ‘2026 Planning and Performance’. This will give me a workspace I can bring together all documents and references, and through Copilot chat will also use my other Microsoft tenant data through the Graph, to focus on this as a project.
This notebook enables me to have numerous discrete chats and prompts focused on this same topic to have multiple topics running in parallel and conveniently grouped.
As well as the documents, links, and chats, I’ve also created 3 page templates to help me:
Action Templates to collate my plan and what activities I’m focused on.
Evidence Log to collate what I’m doing to support my goals.
Monthly Performance Pack to give me a structured way to have conversations with my People Manager.
You can find out more about Notebooks and how to get started through this Microsoft link -
Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks - Microsoft Support
Define and refine your instructions
As with Agents, Copilot Notebooks have the capability to provide it with ‘Instructions’ that the Copilot Notebook has to follow when you’re prompting - This provides additional context and guidance on what you’re trying to achieve
Instructions could be a specific format you want responses delivered, or as a specific persona, or to provide additional context.
I drafted some instructions that took into account the persona roles / levels, and their relationship to me, that I wanted Copilot to use the mindset of and that I wanted them to challenge my thinking. I also included described the Purpose of the Notebook and what I was trying to achieve. I described the Outputs that I was trying to achieve and how I want them to be described.
I then fed those draft instructions into a prompt to tell Copilot what I was doing, and asked it to produce some higher quality, more comprehensive, set of instructions. It made a huge difference!
My instructions now contain the following elements:
Purpose & Persona (What am I trying to achieve and which stakeholder roles / mindset do I want to shape how the prompts are responded to)
Outcomes & Success Criteria (What do I want to achieve? How is my performance evaluated? What sort of evidence will be required?)
Strategic Alignment (Aligning to my Org, Functional, and Department, and Microsoft)
Operating Cadence (What will the Notebook help produce / deliver on a Monthly, Quarterly, Half / Full Yearly to align with organisation standard processes, and a frequency that will enable me to evaluate my performance and pivot as needed.)
Proactive and Reactive Behaviors (What the Notebook should do - Guiding me in the right direction, and reviewing what I’m doing and providing feedback to aid my continuous improvement.)
Leadership & Brand (Considering leadership behaviours to maximise impact across sales, delivery, and people development. Also evaluating my visual brand and identify both internally across the Organisation, Function, and Department & externally as part of the community and MVP network, and into Microsoft.)
Learning and Development (To consider a learning plan that includes Organisation technology, industry, and leadership qualifications, Microsoft Certifications)
Automation & AI Integration (Use the Copilot tooling to Amplify my impact in project work, to extract insights to build evidence for my goals and highlight gaps that I need to fill)
Scenario Planning (Regularly evaluate what risks might present that could disrupt my plan and propose mitigations.)
Reminders & Governance (As well as project delivery, use Organisation milestones and processes for performance or promotion processes to ensure the right activities happen at the right point in time, in the best way.)
Outputs (What I expect from the Notebook on a monthly, quarterly, year-end, or on demand)
Data Sources & References the Notebook should prioritise (Internal webpages, documents, or interactions with specific people.)
Guardrails (To be data driven, evidence-driven, be ethical, inclusive, and non-comparitive, use clear outcome and impact-driven language.)
You can learn more about custom instructions here - Provide custom instructions for your Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebook - Microsoft Support
Automate prompts to support your process
There are multiple activities that need to take place to help make this approach be as effective as possible as well as being light on resource. To do this we are able to save prompts, and schedule them, and then also add them into our Notebook to keep them as part of this project.
My scheduled prompts are:
2026 Priorities Plan - On Demand
Evidence capture (Identify what I’ve done over the month, how it compares to the planned activities, and evaluate it against my goals) - Monthly
Monthly Performance Pack (Document a monthly report to highlight how I’m performing aligning categories and terms to the scoring and grading criteria) - Monthly
SWOT & Visibility Plan (Assess Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to my plan based on all evidence available) - Quarterly or Ad Hoc
Learning & Development Plan (Identify plan and ongoing performance and changes) - Quarterly or Ad Hoc
Risk Scenario Plan (Highlighting disruptions to plan and proposed mitigation) - Quarterly or Ad Hoc
You can find more information of Scheduling prompts here - Schedule Copilot prompts - Microsoft Support
Use M365 Copilot for support, brainstorming, guidance, coaching and mentoring
Once set up we can then use Copilot to help us. We can ask it questions, share our thoughts and ideas, ask for it’s help to split up activities and structure our plans. We can evaluate different options. We can ask it to identify additional stakeholders, to find people to collaborate with or to ask the opinion of. We can use it to identify how our different priorities and plans can interlink to increase out impact. some of the ways that I’m planning to interact with my 2026 Objectives Notebook are:
Understand priorities and objectives - Ask questions to get to deeper level of detail and understanding.
Brainstorm approach and ideas, and plan for each of them - Share my ideas on how I’ll approach each objective and explore if there’s aspects I haven’t considered and work them into a plan.
Identify interrelationships and dependencies - Explore how I can bring different objectives together to make sure that any effort I’m putting into them is as effective as possible and can hopefully add value in multiple areas.
Build a plan of activities for the year - Break down and structure objectives for prioritised delivery throughout the year. Evaluating how the objectives fit against other time commitments and identify where there are time constraints and recommend mitigation.
Provide additional information - Ask for coaching, mentoring, ideas, advice, proposals, and run ad hoc scenarios. Explore other perspectives and view points by asking Copilot to look at your objectives, ideas, and proposals, through the lens of different personas…. Sponsors, Stakeholders, Customers, Change Managers, Practitioners and those impacted etc.
Track performance against plan - Get suggestions for getting back on track, stretch targets, or amplifying value and impact - Seek ways to do more with the time that you have available.
Improve outcomes
The hypothesis is that by taking this approach I will have a more considered and structured approach to my priorities and objectives and spread the activities across the year, maximising the value and impact that I’m making, and being able to create an ongoing case for my performance rating, grade promotion, role changes, whilst also keeping key stakeholders aware of my progress aligned to the required criteria to make my case….
Hopefully my hypothesis will be proven towards the end of the year! :)
Of course, all these principles can also be applied to all sorts of other projects and goals! Go and explore and let me know how well it works for you and what you learn!
