Introduction to navigating Winston

If you have used Gmail and a spreadsheet, you already know most of what Winston's interface asks of you. This article is a quick tour of the four surfaces you will touch every day — the sidebar, records, search, and the keyboard — so that when the rest of Winston 101 mentions a list or a view, you know exactly where to look.

The workspace at a glance

Everything in Winston hangs off the sidebar on the left. It is short on purpose: your inbox at the top, then your objects, then the lists and reports you have pinned. Four words cover the rest of the layout:

• Sidebar — the fixed left column. Your inbox, your objects (People, Companies, Deals, and any custom objects), your pinned lists, and reports all live here. If you are ever lost, come back to the sidebar.
• Records — the individual pages, one per person, company, or deal. A record is the row from your old spreadsheet turned into a full page with history attached.
• Lists — collections of records grouped for a job: Wedding leads 2026, Corporate accounts, Deposits to collect. One record can sit on many lists without being duplicated.
• Views — saved ways of looking at a list or an object: filtered, sorted, as a table or a kanban board. A view is the equivalent of the filter-and-sort setup you would rebuild in Excel every Monday, except it stays saved.

Records and timelines

Open any guest or company record and you will see two halves. On one side sit the attributes — name, email, phone, deal value, and whatever fields you have added. On the other side runs the timeline: every email thread and every calendar event tied to this person, in chronological order.

The timeline is the reason Winston exists. When a guest calls about the booking they emailed you about last month, you are not reconstructing the story from three tools — you open one record and read it top to bottom. Winston reads the same timeline, which is how it keeps attributes current and can draft a reply that actually knows the history.

Search and Ask Winston

Winston gives you two ways to find things, and they answer different questions. Global search is for when you know what you are looking for: type a name, a company, or an email address and jump straight to the record — the same reflex as the search box in Gmail. Ask Winston is for when you have a question rather than a name: "which wedding leads haven't replied in two weeks?" or "what did we quote the Hendersons?" Winston reads across your records and answers in plain language, with links to the records it used.

A useful rule of thumb: if the answer is one record, search. If the answer is a sentence, ask Winston.

Keyboard first

The fastest way around Winston is ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows). It opens the command menu from anywhere: start typing to jump to a record, open a list, create a person or a deal, or run an action — without touching the mouse. If you learn one habit from this article, make it this one.

There are more shortcuts for working through records and inboxes quickly; the Productivity & collaborating section covers them alongside shared views.