You Gotta Keep 'Em Separated: A review of the Shift app

Over the past month, a new piece of software has changed my life: Shift. Shift is a simple yet clever app that at its core is an email app. In fact, it isn’t even that crazy of an email app, it is basically a wrapper around the native web view of services such as Gmail or Microsoft 365. What I love about this app is it goes against the trend of a unified inbox. Hundreds of apps for our phones and computers promise a unified inbox, where all your emails can come in, mingle, and be treated equally. There are certainly times when that approach makes sense (I love breezing through a unified view on my phone first thing in the morning to quickly delete newsletters I signed up for ages ago). But Shift goes the other way, each email account gets its own tab along the left side of the interface. When you click into one of your accounts, all the others go away. What really makes this a game-changer is within each email account you can tab for internet browsing.

If you are like me, you live a compartmentalized life. I have a work-life, a personal life, a side-hustle life, and a passion life – and each of these compartments is separate. And each of these compartments has computer-y things that I do associated with them. With Shift’s internet browsing tabs, I can now separate those compartments even further. No longer do I have a Safari window open with 5 tabs researching something for a client, two tabs open comparing restaurants for date night with my wife, and a YouTube video I promised myself I would watch. When I am in my work tab, all I see is work. I have work emails, work tabs, work web apps. All the other, random computer activity is pushed into the background.

Another approach to this same problem is to have separate virtual desktops for each of your mental compartments. This method never worked for me because I constantly had apps that crossed those boundaries and many apps (single-window ones at least) very much prefer to only be in one virtual desktop. For instance, I couldn’t have my calendar app in both my work and personal desktop, even though when it comes to calendars I approve of cross-pollination.

There are definitely a few new challenges this setup creates, namely the Shift browser does not interface with my password keychain manager – meaning websites never have my passwords saved. 

Overall, Shift doesn’t remove the need for a browser but provides a compartmentalized method for focusing on just one area at a time, which is just how my brain works!