You get your laptop on day one. By day two, you've got access to what technically is Microsoft 365, which means you have access to everything and nothing simultaneously. This is the part nobody quite explains during onboarding.
The setup itself is frictionless. You open your browser, sign in once, and suddenly Teams is there, Outlook is there, OneDrive is there, SharePoint is there. It feels like everything was always waiting for you. But then you realize you're staring at an empty Team for your department that was created last month and has zero messages. The actual team is in a Teams channel called "Real Work" that exists outside the official structure, populated by people who have decided the official structure is theater. Welcome.
What strikes you is how much of your actual day gets consumed just locating where things live. A colleague sends you a document that exists in three places simultaneously: shared in Teams, linked in an email, and mentioned in a SharePoint folder that you've never actually opened. You're not sure which one is current. You ask about it in a meeting and get the response that makes you understand how organizations actually function: "Oh, that one. Yeah, just use the Teams version, it's more up to date." The other versions are still there. They will always be there.
The email situation is its own phenomenon. You receive roughly forty percent fewer emails than you probably would have five years ago because much of that information lives in Teams instead. This should feel like a gift, but what it actually means is that you're constantly checking Teams to see if something important happened while you were in meetings. The rhythm of your day becomes pinging between applications, each of which contains only part of the picture. Notifications arrive in all of them, sometimes for the same conversation. You learn to turn most of them off and just check manually, which defeats the purpose of notifications entirely, but it's the only way to maintain any sense of focus.
Microsoft 365 wasn't supposed to work like this. It was supposed to unify everything. And technically it does. Everything is unified. It's just unified in a way that means you now have more applications to check, not fewer, because the unification is more of a side-by-side arrangement than an actual integration. You still live in separate pockets of information. You've just got better addresses for the pockets.
What's actually interesting though is how quickly you stop thinking about this as a problem. By week three, you've internalized the logic of your organization's particular flavor of Microsoft 365 chaos. You know which Teams channels are real and which are archive. You know whether your team uses email or Teams for decisions, what SharePoint folders actually get updated versus which ones are graveyards. You've mapped the informal structure that sits on top of the formal structure like a second skeleton.
This is what people don't talk about when they talk about digital workplace tools. The technology isn't the problem and it isn't the solution. Organizations are. Your company's version of Microsoft 365 is really just a mirror of how your company actually decides to work, with all the inconsistency and history and compromise that any real organization contains. The software can enable that or constrain it, but it can't fix it.
You'll spend the next few years learning your company's particular arrangement. It will feel chaotic at first. Then it will feel normal. Then you won't think about it at all.