Magic Spaces
Using virtual desktops to make your knowledge work feel tractable.
If you work across a lot of different domains and projects, you are probably used to a computer screen that looks like this:
Dozens of browser tabs and windows, Finder windows, notes, and stuff all jumbled together. It’s a problem:
it’s hard to remain in a flow-state on a project when you’re buried in windows and files that you don’t need to see
starting work for the day sucks when all your things are jumbled together
impossible to tell what’s important/useful in any given moment
Solution—kind of:
macOS has an awesome feature built in called “Spaces”, which gives you multiple virtual desktops. Spaces are awesome—they let you maintain multiple workspaces, each with their own set of windows. This helps with focus, but it’s still pretty overwhelming:
It’s hard to tell at a glance which workspace is associated with a particular project. Try it out for a day and see how it feels—if you’re like me, you’ll probably end up swiping through all the desktops to find the one with the browser window you need. Not to mention digital work doesn’t respect your nice clean boundaries: emails come in, we download files, spawn tabs and it turns into a chaotic jumble super quickly.
Cue the “one easy trick”
This technique has been a gamechanger for me. It’s the only productivity hack that I’ve used consistently for the last five years, and it’s dead simple.
You make a desktop sized image for each project you’re working on:
You open each image in Preview, resize the window as large as it can go (without pressing the full-screen button), and drag the open image window into the appropriate workspace.
When you’re not actively working on a project, bring the image window to focus so that it sits atop all of the project related mess.
Result: a glanceable 10,000 foot overview of all of your open loops. I cannot overstate the degree of calm focus this brings—
When you’re done working on a project for the day, tab the Preview window back to the top to conceal the mess until you’re ready to work on it again.
Here’s a copy of the template I use‚ openable in Sketch or Figma.
Getting the most from this technique
A few extra tips—
Turn off automatic re-arrangement of your Spaces
By default, macOS will rearrange your Spaces as you use them and jump to Spaces when you tab into an app, which is disorienting. This technique works best when you can focus an app (like your browser) and create new windows as needed without jumping between Spaces.
Get a browser workspace management tool, such as Workona.
Workona lets you save all of the resources associated with a project, like tabs, Google documents, etc; to its own workspace that can be saved and resumed. Make sure you turn on “Open workspaces in separate windows.”
Assign project-independent apps to all of your Spaces
I find that I open my email, calendar and Roam pretty consistently regardless of the project I’m working on. You can right click on an app in the Dock and assign it to “All Spaces” so these ‘visor’ apps follow you around.
And that’s it! If this is helpful to you, or you’ve got a remix of this technique that works for you, let me know on Twitter (@AndyAyrey)—I’d love to hear from you!