Organize Your Workflow with Spaces

Spaces is a great way to separate your tasks.

Up until just recently, I never used Spaces in Leopard. It was a new feature that I had been excited about when Leopard was debuting, but a few experiments showed that it didn’t fit with my habits. Or that it was poorly implemented by Apple. Or that I simply did not need it.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I been doing some different work for different clients for the past few months. The varying types of tasks and responsibilities were making me wish I had some way to organize the various tools/applications I needed for each. I spent a while thinking about how applications were organized in my Dock and trying a few tools that modified the Dock or added a different Dock for each Space. But I soon realized that the Dock was not a good tool to try to organize your work.

So I gave Spaces another try and have been really pleased with the results. I posted about this on Twitter and had a few people ask questions—incorporating virtual desktops is not always an intuitive change. So I summarized how I use Spaces in this post.

The Setup

First, I went back to a post I remembered from John Gruber regarding the changes Apple made to Spaces in 10.5.3 which make it workable for more people. They added one preference as a checkbox. I revisited this post on DF to see if I had the preference set in the correct manner (like John says, the wording in the label can be misleading).

Note the unchecked preference at the bottom.

Secondly, I sat down and brainstormed all the different pieces of work I do and what applications I use for each. From there, I mapped out how many Spaces (desktops) I would need. Then I configured my Spaces preferences so that each application that is used for only one type of work gets assigned to that particular Space. Any application that is used for various types of work is not assigned to a Space (ex. Safari). See my preferences on the right.

Once that is configured, your setup is ready to make good use of multiple desktops.

Usage

I’ll say a few words on how I use Spaces as that seems to be where people struggle with this feature.

Navigation

First up is navigation. There are various ways to move from space to space. Spaces gives you several options. You can set up a hotkey to invoke Spaces, which brings up the screen shown at the top of the post. It displays a thumbnail of all your Spaces with the open windows in each. You can then click on the Space you wish to navigate to1.

Secondly there is an option to display Spaces in your menubar. Mouse-clicking on the icon reveals a dropdown with all the Spaces listed. Click on the desired Space.

Third, you can click on application icons in the Dock twice to move to the Space the application currently resides.

Lastly, and my favorite, there is a preference to switch Spaces with the keyboard. I use the Control+Arrow Keys to achieve this. It’s a very fast, easy way to get from one Space to another.

Working

Here’s where the confusion seems to come in. In his article, John Gruber said that in 10.5.0 to 10.5.2, when switching applications, Spaces would pull you from your active Space to a different Space where the application you desire is currently active. Some people seem to have taken what he says about the change in 10.5.3—if you unchecked that bottom checkbox in the preferences—to mean that Spaces would now pull that application to the Space you are currently working in.

That’s not true. All this new preference does is make it so that Spaces does not jump to another Space without your telling it to. This is what makes Spaces work for me—I can have task specific applications stick to one space. At the same time, the applications I may use for different types of work can be used in multiple Spaces.

This may raise the question of how to use a tool in multiple Spaces. Well, it depends on the application. From my usage and testing, document based apps such as Safari work the best. Application based apps tend to stay in the same space, where as a document based app gives you the option to open a new window in your current Space, even if the app was opened originally in another Space.

I know that sounds somewhat confusing so I think an example works best. Gruber uses Safari in his example and it’s one of the key apps I want to use in all my Spaces. By not assigning Safari to a specific Space, I can use it in all. So in my main Space (Space 1), I always have Safari open for general web browsing and RSS reading. But if I’m writing a blog post, I switch to Space 4. Now if I need to research something online, I Command+Tab to Safari and then press Command+N to open a new Safari window.

I use the exact same idea for Mail. It’s always open in my main Space, but if I ever need to send a message while working on something in another Space, I use the same keyboard commands to compose/send from there2.

Maybe what I’ve described doesn’t work for you. But I’m tickled because it fits my needs perfectly. This is what is so great about being a Mac user. There are so many ways to work and interact with your hardware and software. Each person should be able to find a method that fits their working style.

Witch

Witch works really well with Spaces.

One last thing worth mentioning. I’ve talked about a utility named Witch in the past. I’ll mention it again because I think it works so great with Spaces. Using the Alt+Tab combo rather than the Command+Tab combo gives you the ability to cycle through open windows rather than open applications. The great thing that Witch does is it only displays the windows in open in the current Space.

You only see the windows that you are directly working with. The list is considerably shorter than cycling through a long list of applications. Brilliant.


Once I started thinking about my work by grouping various areas of responsibilities, Spaces became much more relevant to me. I can sit down at my desk and have multiple things going on at once without feeling overwhelmed. Having one desktop with more than 10 open windows would stress me out.

Spaces gives me some visual separation that makes it easier to stay organized. And that I like.

  1. For keyboard lovers, you can also tab through the Spaces and hit enter when you have selected the desired Space. []
  2. I would be remiss to not mention that I also use Quicksilver to send messages, but that’s another post for another day. []