If you’ve ever been in the zone at work, you know that your work is usually of a better quality, completed faster, and just seems to flow from you. Whether that’s in the form of creativity, analysis, or knocking out sales call after sales call, there are those days when nothing is stopping you and nothing can get you off your game. Wouldn’t it be nice to be in this zone more often?
A State of Flow
Explored by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Too often, however, it’s impossible to enter this state—life just gets in the way. A distraction, an ‘urgent’ message from your boss asking you to do something time consuming and monotonous, or a Slack notification that has nothing to do with you. Distractions happen.
Pair this with the amount of monotonous tasks you need to do anyway, and it becomes even harder to get in this zone.
One such example of this resides in an alarming APQC statistic—more than half of a finance professional’s time is spent in transaction processing. Rather than adding strategic value or informing organizational decisions, your highly paid finance staff is digging through transactions to approve requests. Added to this, think how much time the sales team spends manually working on CRM or documenting expenses.
Microsoft Flow: Freeing Your Team from Tedium
If you’re looking to simplify your work by automating the monotony, creating more effective workflows, and setting your team up for success, Microsoft has a product designed for just that.
Microsoft Flow is a service that helps you create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data and more. Featuring a thousands of flexible templates to connect hundreds of applications, Microsoft Flow is part of the Microsoft Power Platform.
Microsoft Flow can do things as simple as sending you a push notification with today’s weather, notify you when a new file was added to a team OneDrive account, match a Tweet to a contact in your CRM, or you could initiate much more complex Flows using the AI Builder or the Common Data Service.
Much like its partners in the Power Platform—Power BI and PowerApps—you can connect data from on premises or in the cloud to improve the speed of your business, working to deliver more revenue, better decision making, and set your business up for success.
Flow is free to use and offers a simple setup for most applications, but like Power BI, people experienced in the application can often work with you to create more complex and powerful workflows.
As a specialist in Microsoft applications and the Power Platform as a whole, MIBAR can help you to get Flow, PowerApps, and Power BI up and running so that you can do more. In the coming months, we will explore more about these applications, but if you are looking for assistance getting set up, get to know MIBAR. Contact us for more information.
