We sat down with Carey Ann to learn more about how using Shift has helped her put processes in place to manage her busy workflow. Check out the conversation, below!

** Carey Ann is using the old version of Shift (v7). Check out the new version of Shift (v8), here. **

Carey Ann is the Director of Wet Lab Operations at Greentown Labs, one of North America's largest climate-tech startup incubators. Working at the executive level, her responsibilities extend to various areas of the business and she often finds herself managing a workflow with many complicated moving parts. In her day-to-day, Carey Ann helps the business create, grow, and optimize operations. Subsequently, she's built an astute understanding of laboratory operations, and proper safety procedures, and in doing so has discovered a natural knack for project management!

Outside of her professional responsibilities, Carey Ann is a proud dog mom and loves connecting with nature at both state and national parks. 

Life Before Shift 

As a Director of Operations, Carey Ann's responsibilities are spread out across numerous areas which required her to have an unmanageable number of tabs opened in each browser window (for which she has several) to account for all her digital tools. With multiple different email accounts and two separate Slack accounts, maneuvering between her tabs and communication tools became quite time-consuming and she was spending time attempting to context-switch; time that otherwise could have been spent contributing to growing the business. 

"Before Shift, I had 900,000 tabs and windows open... folks used to make fun of me when they saw me swooshing on my trackpad to switch between tabs!"

After coming across a social media ad for Shift in February 2020, Carey Ann downloaded the platform, created her free account, and was instantly sold on the fact that she could streamline all her tools in one place. She's been using Shift as her daily driver ever since.

Life After Shift 

Immediately after jumping into Shift, Carey Ann began to see the efficiencies created by streamlining her email accounts, browser tabs, and applications; Asana, Twitter, Zoho Vault, Apple Notes, and Google Photos, to name a few. Efficiencies and optimization are extremely important to her as she's very involved with various start-ups, which are always moving very quickly, and she needs to keep pace. By compartmentalizing her workflow in a way that allows her to work efficiently, Carey Ann has found a competitive advantage.

"I am a big fan of efficiencies and optimization... immediately, I could see the value Shift brings."

As with many other users, Carey Ann's favorite Shift feature is Workspaces. She gets the most out of Shift by organizing all her tabs and bookmarks under different Workspaces, which are subsequently sorted according to her duties (she's also customized each Workspace icon to help with icon differentiation). After three years of working in Shift, every day, Carey Ann highlights how agile her workflow has become and how much time she saves in small chunks on a daily basis.

Personal Interests

When she's not working with start-ups, Carey Ann loves spending time with her husband and her Yellow Labrador, Franklin, exploring state and national parks, and visiting any brewery that allows pets. 

Connect with Carey Ann on LinkedIn, 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.