I'd say workspaces aren't for everyone, and you're right: they require setup and discipline or else the context switching is too disruptive. I think they're go

I'd say workspaces aren't for everyone, and you're right: they require setup and discipline or else the context switching is too disruptive. I think they're good if you can organize them effectively with separate tasks on the different workspaces, such that you don't need to switch between them frequently: this way, you can minimize distractions from other tasks that you're not working on currently, and might not work on for hours or days even. For the chat and email stuff, as long as you have screen space (or if you don't mind them going to the background sometimes), you can set those windows to be on every workspace. KDE has a thumbtack icon that you can click in the window bar to make that window show on every desktop.