I too very often use shift. I always shift of the first argument in methods. I'm sure you understand why, but I'll say why anyway. It's because I want them to be more like regular subroutine calls, where I can do nice checks on scalar(@_). And, having

sub foo {
    my $self = shift;
    ...
}
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certainly makes a good visual aid for me. I often even prefer to do

    my $self = shift;
    my ($this, $that) = @_;
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over     my ($self, $this, $that) = @_; -Anomo