I have 21 drawers by my office desk. These hold stationery, paper, books to read, pens and pencils, pocket knifes, old thumbdrives, book manuscripts, keys, cables, in-progress projects, client-specific items, old journals I haven’t scanned yet, charging adapters, and much more. Each drawer has a particular focus, and over time and with repeated usage, I get pretty good at knowing where a given item is located. Repetition builds and extends recollection, so that I’m not usually rummaging through all 21 drawers to find a given object. For the drawers I use frequently, I know where to find what I’m looking for.

But the drawers are inter-changeable, so one can be withdrawn easily from one drawer unit and put into another one. So it’s entirely possible – and I’ve done this multiple times over the years – to re-allocate where each drawer is. Some items move to the top of the drawer stacks, others move towards the bottom.

And what chaos it creates. Now I’m usually rummaging. Now I’m opening each drawer in quick succession to find the object I’m looking for. Now I’m annoyed because something has moved, even though it was me who moved it – for a good reason. But once again, it’s a short-term pain and things settle into a new pattern; I know where to look, I can quickly locate each item, and I’m ready to work.
Making improvements to my drawer allocations has similar short term impacts when improving work through new tools like Office 365. While the baseline toolset is roughly the same – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – achieving the impact and improvement requires changes in behaviour.

From hiding files on a personal drive to hosting them in SharePoint or OneDrive.

From controlling the world through Outlook to collaborating with the world through Teams, Yammer and Skype.

From relying on intentional search in SharePoint to resting with intent-aware serendipity via Delve and the Office Graph.

And then once you have developed a new rhythm, Microsoft changes things. Moves the drawers, as you will. A new feature here, a deprecated feature there, and a moved around feature over there … and the new way of working you were developing gets disrupted (slightly or more severely). But persevere. See the change, understand what it means for you, and keep going. Because truth be told (apologies in advance, I couldn’t resist saying it this way) – mark my word here – if you want to excel, you will need to change your outlook on toolset change and just flow with it individually and within your team.

The drawers might have been shifted. But you can still do your work with agility, flexibility and awesomeness. It will just take a few days to recapture your rhythm.