I use it daily on my iPad Pro, and started using it regularly on my MBP.

iPad

I teach English. Basically instead of using a white board, I connect my iPad to a TV using a USB hub and use FreeForm with an Apple Pencil as my whiteboard. In the same “stage” as Freeform, I have a Safari window open to DuckDuckGo image search. If a student doesn’t understand what something might be and my explanation doesn’t suffice, I use safari to search an image, then I can just drag it into the freeform and add notes to it. After class, I export the FreeForm to PDF and email it to the students. I have another “stage” with Readdle Documents for doing PDF’d textbook work along with the students, paired with a small timer app and other simple class management tools.

Mac

In the past, I used to just have all my most used apps open to full screen. Primary desktop in the middle with a bunch of finder windows open, then swipe desktops left and right to reach different apps (or use command center or whatever it is to make bigger jumps quickly). I would put reference-based and background things like a browser, numbers, Slack, etc to the left of my desktop and production-based apps like Affinity Publisher, Pages, and Keynote to the right. I would keep a second desktop open for personal things like iMessage, safari, calendar to be open in windows.

With stage manager, now I just keep all my chat apps grouped in a stage, a group of finder windows in a stage, my email & calendar in a stage, and my safari windows in a stage. I still keep numbers, pages, and affinity in dedicated full-screen spaces because it’s better for focusing. I feel the trade off is that my apps are better grouped and better organized. However, stage manager still pisses me off in several ways.

Issues

• There’s a limit to the number of stages you have access to on the side of your screen.
• Mission Control doesn’t group apps by stages and it makes everything super messy.
• You can’t open an app into a stage. It needs to be opened into its own stage, then you need to drag it into the one you want it in.
• There’s no way to preset and launch stages.
• There could be better keyboard shortcuts for navigating stages.
• Migrating an app from one stage of apps into a different one is tricky.

There’s more but this is good enough and I need to go to work now.