My latest workflow improvement has been abandoning my extremely customized rice that also used my own wm and other home-made tools, to be honest.

I used KDE Plasma after that for a while, I still use it on my laptop. It is the BEST DE experience you can have on Linux, it's very polished and integrated, too bad Qt looks kinda bad.

I am now using a very lightly configured openbox setup, with a stolen theme with altered colors and a terminal theme that doesn't match the setup at all, for the sake of contrast (This one). I haven't even configured stuff like workspace rules, because I usually have very few windows. I don't even use workspaces, even though sometimes I think that I should. I also have a dock with auto-hide (yes, I use the mouse) and jgmenu to launch stuff.

I am looking into switching to light color schemes. White on black text is much easier to read than black on white.