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We sat down with Mary to chat about staying organized as she juggles the many facets of her professional and personal life. Check out the recap of our conversation, below!
Mary is using the old version of Shift (v7). Check out the new version of Shift (v8), here.
As a talent manager at Vena Solutions, Mary leads a team hyperfocused on talent acquisition and global recruitment strategies. Mary is also the founder of Campfire Culture (based in Toronto, Canada), a people operations and human resources consulting firm for start-ups across North America. She's an advocate for the employee experience and, with over a decade of industry experience as a people and talent leader, dedicates time to guide and advise in a mentorship role.
When she's not working, Mary enjoys exploring new hiking trails, attending local concerts, and getting a chuckle out of the latest TikTok.
Discovering Shift
Prior to Shift, Mary's workflow was spread out across an absurd amount of web tabs and browser windows. As you can imagine, leading her team full-time while also growing her own business comes with a breadth of responsibilities. With so many different aspects of her professional life happening all at once, the visual chaos of web tabs was overwhelming and negatively impacting her well-being. Notably, the mass amount of tabs also happened to be running her computer into the ground.
As one of those individuals who has a tool for everything, Mary knew she couldn't be the only one struggling to compartmentalize her workflow and figured there must be a solution out there. She came across Shift in December of 2019 and, after downloading Shift and reaching out to the team for a free 7-day trial of Advanced, she immediately purchased and has been a paid user ever since.
"Shift brings it all together and helps me create dedicated spaces for all aspects of my life."
Getting the Most Out Of Shift
Mary gets value out of Shift by being able to create dedicated spaces for the different parts of her life. On the professional side, being able to keep workflows related to her full-time job separated from workflows related to running her business, yet have those workflows live in the same centralized place, was a game-changer for her. Beyond her professional responsibilities, she also utilizes Shift to organize aspects of her personal life; one of the examples she gave us is having a Workspace dedicated to the planning of her upcoming baby shower (did someone say spreadsheet galore?)!
Having all of her spaces organized neatly within Shift's streamlined UI creates a visually appealing launchpad that helps Mary context-switch without feeling overwhelmed. The biggest takeaway we got from this part of our conversation with Mary, is that visual organization is a key component of an efficient workflow, and working within Shift has helped her shrink her workflow into a digestible way that allows her to focus on what matters.
"Shift allows me to organize the chaos; it's the method behind the madness of my day-to-day."
With the flexibility that comes with Shift, many users find benefits that are unique to their workflows (for Mary, this was the accessibility of the Google Drives for each of her email accounts. For context, each email account added to Shift adds the respective calendar, Drive, and Google Services menu associated with that specific email). However, time and time again, the recurring theme is that quick context-switching is invaluable. Having all your spaces organized in front of you drastically reduces the clicks required to get where you need to go.
Shift vs. A Regular Browser
When we asked Mary how Shift compares to her regular work browser, she responded: "It's so much more than that. If more people jumped in and used it, they would get it and see for themselves how helpful it is". To the nay-sayers who may think working in Chrome tabs works just fine, Mary has this to say:
“Sure, you could have a bunch of browser tabs open, but you're still not solving the problem of visual chaos. There is simply no focus or organization with a million web tabs open. Period. [SHIFT] helps me organize my life so much that I never want to go back to the way I was working in Chrome."
Looking to support employee growth, well-being, and increase engagement? Get in touch with Mary and the team at Campfire Culture, here.
What's next?
Ready to try Shift for yourself? Download now!
Find quick tips and best practices in our Getting Started section here.
Read about other Shift Case Studies here.
