pat loughery

One of the best features of the Mac OS (10.5 and above) is called Spaces. You can think of Spaces as four different clumps of video displays, all aimed at your same monitor. Using spaces allows you to keep a large number of apps running, but keep them well organized, and flip between batches with a single keystroke or two.

A short while ago, John Chandler wrote an excellent post over at Creativityist (a blog I super highly recommend) about how he uses Mac OS’s spaces feature to help him be more productive. I really liked his intentionality, and how he categorized the use of each of the four spaces available to him.

My needs are slightly different – I have two main differences as this point. One is that for John, web browsers are distractions from his main work, so he sets up a space for his production tools. For me, since I use gmail from its web interface and not via mail.app, Thunderbird or any other client, gmail is a key production app for me. So is Google Reader.

In my current job, my Mac (which is my personal machine) is a secondary machine. I have a Windows Vista laptop which is my main production box, from which I do all work-related tasks – writing specifications and test plans, work email, writing and executing test cases, that type of thing. So I have the luxury of toting along a secondary box that can remain ‘personal’.

Finally, I’m back and forth between a dual monitor setup. I’ve set up spaces so that it all works fine on a single monitor environment, and then if I’m at a desk with a secondary monitor, then that monitor becomes what John uses as his Production space – for me, that’s often either a browser or it’s Word or Ecto.

So with that said, here is how use Spaces.

• Space 1 – Browsers. I use Firefox and Safari together for a variety of reasons. Firefox lets me start with multiple tabs open; my current config starts with Gmail, Google Reader, Flickr and Facebook open (now that I’m not working on a Facebook app for work, I’ll probably not load FB automatically).
• Space 2 – Communication. This gets Skype, Adium, Twitteriffic, which lets me quickly flip to and away from the space for minimum distraction.
• Space 3 – Reference. This space holds OmniFocus, Evernote and iTunes, and is the one that’s likely to grow as more, not-so-regular apps are loaded.
• Space 4 – Writing. This one gets Mac Word 2008 (which doesn’t always respect the space it’s assigned to), OmniOutliner, ecto, Freemind. I’m still debating this, but I think this is where Lightroom will go, plus VMWare for my occasional forays into Windows on this machine.

Flipping between spaces is easy – CTRL+arrow, and I’m done.

It’s features like this, in particular, that make me spend my own money on a Mac, rather than just using my work-furnished machine and making do.