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Working from home has been a challenge for everyone, especially those who get distracted easily. It’s only a matter of time before chrome has 13 tabs open and you keep jumping in between.
In this digital age, distractions are widely available, from social media to an interesting article you’ve stumbled upon, its very easy to fall into a rabbit hole that ends up wasting part of your workday, but you can easily solve that by trying out a tool like Shift.
TL;DR
Overall, using Shift will almost guarantee a productivity increase, especially if you run a business where you manage multiple email accounts, or you switch between apps often.
You can also use the deal below to try out the free plan of Shift.
What is Shift?
Shift (Commonly known as Tryshift) is a desktop browser for busy people, that consolidates all of the apps and email accounts you use into one beautiful dashboard, so you can forget all of your multi-tab problems, stay focused on your work, and increase your productivity.
Shift Features
You can add multiple apps, email accounts, users, and more into one dashboard that lets you easily switch between them at the click of a button, and without having to log in and out of accounts.
Multiple Email Accounts
In this day and age, anyone has multiple email accounts even if you don’t run a business, and keeping up with them all is a pain, Shifts multiple inbox feature is a great way to stay updated on all of your emails and deadlines, whether it’s Gmail, Office 360, or Outlook. It can be added to Shift.
Once you add multiple email accounts, they’ll all appear in the sidebar and will have a small notification bubble with the number of unread emails in your account, you can easily switch between them without having to log in once again.
You can also easily navigate through your Google Drive and calendar easily, as well as switch between your calendars easily.
Apps and Extensions
Email accounts aren’t the only thing that integrates with Shift, business and productivity apps are available to add to Shift, 1500+ Apps to be exact. Chrome Extension also works within the apps you use within your personal dashboard.
Not all apps are available, but I found most of the apps I already use to be working flawlessly, like Sunsama, Motion, and ClickUp. You can recommend apps to the shift team if they aren’t available already, and you can also add the URL of an app, and it will function as one.
Previously, only a small selection of Chrome extensions was available, but with the new V8 update, you can add any extension available on Chrome to Shift.
Unified Search
If you frequently need to check old files you’ve received in your email, it can be a pain to search through every account, cloud storage, or email thread just to find one file, fortunately, you can use the unified search, which lets you search through all of your email accounts and cloud storage accounts like Google Drive to find the specific file you are looking for.
Password Manager
For security reasons, it is recommended to use a new password for every account you have, but keeping track of them all is a nightmare without some help to take care of storing passwords.
some apps like 1Password exist to help generate and keep track of passwords and it is strongly recommended to use it, but copying your password from the app every time you want to log in will get cumbersome very quickly, or you can use the integrated Password Manager to keep track of and autofill all of your passwords. 1Password also integrates with Shift, if your organization already uses it to manage passwords.
Focused Tabs
If you frequently do some research on the web, you should know how hard context switching can be when you go between your browser and back to work. Switching between work and research can really hurt your productivity, and that’s why using the focused tabs can be so good to quickly do the research you need and quickly get back to work.
Drawbacks of Shift
until now, Shift Seemed like the perfect tool for me, until I ran into some things that made me notice that Tryshift isn’t the perfect tool I thought it was.
The most obvious con is that it’s inevitable that you won’t find an app you already use within your team, and even though you can add any URL to Shift and it will act as an app, you’ll run into some issues as the web app doesn’t always play nice with the Shift.
The Biggest problem with Shift is that some text fields in websites just don’t work. It’s very strange, sometimes a refresh solves the problem, or I have to switch to another browser to enter text, and it works just fine. It’s a very small problem, but the more it occurs the more frustrating it gets.
Another Fault of Shift is that even though the app is very light on your computer if you are editing a large file, or using a performance-heavy application, you might notice a difference in performance when working if you have a rather old device or low-spec device like a Chromebook.
Pricing
Shift has three pricing plans, the free plan is a good way to test out the tool, but you’ll feel that the free plan is very constricting and won’t unlock the full power of the tool.
The second plan is the Pro plan which costs 99$ per year, and unlocks all of the powerful features of the tool, like the password manager and chrome extensions.
The third plan is the Team plan which costs 99$ per user, and has all of the features of the Pro plan but also supplies the manager with a dashboard to review the team’s productivity.
Conclusion
Shift is a nice tool for office workers, especially considering that it would cut down the wasted time of your office personnel, and raise the workforce’s productivity.
