My way of making it all nice and not a hard chore: use a tiling window manager - I used to use Amethyst but screen sharing makes it go wild in some cases, so no

My way of making it all nice and not a hard chore: use a tiling window manager - I used to use Amethyst but screen sharing makes it go wild in some cases, so now I use yabai; I never quit any app so if I close something I'm rebooting in which case what can you expect?; as many apps as possible need to be full screen so I'm actually using many virtual desktops, more than multiple displays; keyboard shortcuts in my memory to navigate to where I want to go and to throw app windows from one display to another, move focus and so on; dock always at the bottom with autohide for reasons pointed out by OP. But by far the most important thing I remember to do is to organise and move things based on the work I'm doing at that moment. I normally have three displays: MBP to side (right side, so I can use the trackpad near my keyboard if I want, although I also have an external trackpad in home office), and 2 x large monitors, one directly in front, one to the left angled in slightly. Focus app - web browsing (like right now), email, doc writing, coding, whatever - that's coming onto the large central display. Left display is stuff I want to keep near but might be a distraction. Documentation, slack, email if I'm meant to be focusing on other things. MBP is basically a video conferencing display (camera is right above the screen, feels natural), perhaps a terminal for command line stuff, and so on. I'm rearranging desktops and moving them around at the start of each focused block of work (which is typically every hour or so), and there are some "standard" layouts I use when doing meetings/calls. When my MBP is out on the road with me, one virtual desktop for web, one for email, one for calendar, one for slack, one for code editor, and so on... TLDR: I made some tooling choices, and am prepared to spend a couple of minutes to move things around and make sure you're setup for focusing on a task I'm about to dive into. The key thing is I'm feeling comfortable for the task, not comfortable for all tasks and everything is always in the same state.