Change sure eats up time

It’s amazing how sometimes you can completely lose track of time and days. And even simple things you normally do.
It’s been that way for me since I returned to work following the Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championship.
Even the week of the bass tournament, I seemed really organized. Everything was caught up.
My mismanagement of time has come from modernizing (what software companies refer to as updating their software). Some software that we began using around 1990 had stopped being supported by its company in 2006, and we continued using it through to now.
I have spent two weeks moving through change and it has occupied my waking hours (and I suspect even sleeping ones, too).
Because another software company, which we do layout with, updated their software, we discovered that making a change in any software would cripple the others. We would have had a fruit bowl of software with nothing talking to each other.
Our upgrading began with the installation of new servers, some new switches, and additional computers. That was the easy part.
The technical trainer flew in and for the first two days, we did nothing but installations on the new computers and those existing ones which could handle the speed and complexity of the programs. Training then began.
The new software, although acting completely different, does exactly what the old software used to accomplish. The exception is that it is newer, more robust, and could look after 250 reporters in an office.
Simply, it is powerful—far more powerful than this newspaper really needs.
With the software changes came whole new work flows. We created change, and the difficult thing is that change is always hard to handle. In learning this new system, all the easy commands we once had at our fingertips before now have new coding. That is what the new “cheat sheet” is for.
Needless to say, for the past two weeks the staff has been stressed, and trying to learn all the intricacies to stay ahead of the users and help them has been difficult. As such, I have lost track of time.
I have lost track of the traditional jobs I perform during the course of the week and when I finally sat down at my desk Monday morning, it was buried under a pile of paper.
My calendar, which I put everything to do on, popped up with several past due messages—telling me I had missed a couple of conference calls.
And then Monday afternoon, a message came from Ken Johnston, our editor in Rainy River, inquiring if I had a column for this week. It, too, was missed.