Do you want to increase your productivity without a cold plunge, sauna, or any other extra nonsense? If you’re work life centers around computer interaction for more than a few hours a day, this article will help you claw some of those hours back. It’s taken me a few weeks of research and tinkering to get a very smooth setup that works perfectly for me. But I’ll be giving you my entire setup starting with workspaces.

What are workspaces?

You can think of a workspace as the screen you’re looking at now. It’s just a place that work can be performed on a computer. Having multiple workspaces is similar to having multiple screens, you can open different applications on each, switch to looking at another, and then switch back without issue. Basically, they’re virtual screens that you can switch between.

Why they’re powerful

Workspaces are a very powerful tool that simultaneously allows for multitasking while promoting focused work. That seems like an oxymoron, so let me explain. Multitasking in the sense that you’re juggling multiple tasks at a time is usually inefficient and undesirable. Multitasking in a computer sense is having more than one application at a time without impeding functionality of each other. With multiple workspaces, you can open all your required applications in separate workspaces. Since everything is open already, switching between programs as a part of a single task is easy.

Here’s an example:
While writing bash scripts for my workspace setup, I needed to run tests after changes. So one workspace had my editor open and another workspace had my test environment and logfiles open. I simple press a single key on to switch between them.

Or, while writing this article, I needed to check information through the web, I quickly switched to my browser and then switch back. A properly setup workspace environment can dramatically increase your productivity. For me there’s a simple philosophy I’ve gathered from others that works for me.

Philosophy

Why would changing your setup to include workspaces improve your productivity? Focus, workflow matching, and speed. If your computer setup helps with each of these, your productivity will skyrocket. Predefining workspaces will help you focus by having all your tools open, available, and easy to access. Setting your workspaces to match your typical workflow(s) will reduce the switching friction of your work. And setting a single key press to access each of your workspaces will dramatically improve the speed of your work.

Focus

Pre-defining what applications will be on each screen gives you the opportunity to setup an environment that minimizes distractions.
This works two ways:
First, having the applications you need for work makes starting easier.
Second, a proper setup makes it more difficult to open unnecessary applications.

Workflow matching

What’s your typical workflow for your most important work of the day?
My guess is that you’re using multiple applications to accomplish it. I’ll also guess that when you switch away from your main task, it’s something predictable, like an email, slack / teams message, etc. If all of your workflow elements are already open and waiting for your input in predictable places, a lot of your mental overhead disappears.

Speed

This is really where workspaces become necessary. Technically, you can decide which applications are required for your most important tasks and open them on the same, or even dual screens. However, for every application you have to switch to slows you down because you’re alt-tabbing, moving back and forth between the keyboard and mouse, or visually searching. A faster way, is to setup workspaces specific to each application or work action.

For example, my setup has Morgen calendar on workspace 0 and obsidian notes on workspace 1. (for me 0 is the first workspace) On all my computers/systems I can go to workspace 0 and see my schedule for the day, or workspace 1 and see my tasks or meeting notes. While dedicated workspaces gets you most of the way, the real cheat code is single button switching. For me, pressing F1 takes me to my calendar, F2 shows my notes, F3 my editor, etc.

Of everything in this article, single key press access to your programs will result in the largest jump in productivity.

My setup

I already mentioned my calendar application and notes applications, but here is my whole workspace setup:

0. F1: Morgen Calendar app -> scheduling, tasks, meetings
1. F2: Obsidian notes app -> tasks, meeting notes
2. F3: Editor -> editing a variety of files
3. F4: Terminal for testing, updating my system, ssh, or local AI agent
4. F5: Geary -> email
5. F6: Keepassxc -> password management
6. F7: Librewolf -> browser
7. F8: Pithos -> internet radio

Workspaces next to each other for flow

Related applications, or those that I typically use together are next to each other. For example, Morgen calendar has an integration option with obsidian that can take tasks setup in obsidian and automatically schedule them during predefined windows of time in Morgen. Or, my editor, where I might be tweaking part of a script or program, is next to an extra terminal I’ll use for running tests on my changes. In practice, this is left pinky finger and left ring finger in the first example, then left middle finger and left pointer finger in the second example. As you might have guessed, these are the applications I interact with most and are therefore grouped together on my left hand. The remaining workspaces I use on a daily basis, but not as often. If you look at most keyboards, the F1-F4 keys are directly above the home row for the left hand, but the F5-F8 keys are not directly above the home row for the right hand. So I’ve prioritized my most important workspaces to the left since they’re easier to access.
Interestingly I still access F5-F8 with my left hand.

Tools and setup

You’ll need a few tools to make a workspace setup that allows for single key navigation. Unfortunately for windows users, there’s not many options, as the default windows manager requires you to navigate through each workspace, similar to alt-tabbing. But there is at least one good option for most operating systems. My setup is on Ubuntu 24, so all of my actual examples are in reference to that.

Window managers

For windows, the best manager I could find that allows for single key navigation is glazewm. I personally haven’t used this before, but there’s lots of examples online. For mac users, Yabai seems to be one of the best options.
For linux users there are two good options. First is i3; which can usually be installed using your native package manager. However all of my experience is using x11 with wmctrl; which the details of my examples will reference. It’s important to note that the main ideas apply no matter your operating system or workspace tool:

1. One predefined application per workspace
2. Workspaces arranges to support your typical workflow(s)
3. Single key navigation between workspaces

Setup

If you’re following exactly my setup, you’ll need to make sure of a few things. First, make sure you’re using X11. Go to settings > system > system details and make sure you see X11 under windowing system:

If you don’t, you’ll need to change your default server to X11 first. You’ll also need to install dconf through your package manager. Lastly, you’ll need to turn on workspaces and decide on the number (I’m using 8):

Keyboard shortcuts with dconf

Getting the single key navigation working for 8 workspaces is a little tricky. If you’re only going to use 4 workspaces, you can skip dconf and just change the keyboard shortcuts in Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Navigation. If you’re going to use more, dconf is necessary. Be careful not to change anything in dconf unless you know what it does. Making a mistake here could make your system very difficult or impossible to navigate.

Here’s a photo of the exact places and settings you’ll need to have for more than 4 workspaces:

Make sure to navigate to the correct locations using the address bar at the top.

You’ll also need to manually edit each workspace entry in the “Custom Value” area. Make sure the default value setting is turned off and the custom values look exactly like this.

What’s next

You now have a workspace setup that helps you focus on the applications you need for your workflow and you can switch between them with lightening speed.

So what’s next, How do I make it better?
Next, I will go over my login script that opens every application I want, in the work space I want, the instant I login to my computers.