I map Ctrl-Fx for F1 to F8 to each of my 8 virtual desktops, and have specific tasks (and window sets) open on each of them -- mostly xterms and emacs buffers. A couple of keystrokes always finds what I need. The key is establishing a task-to-desktop mapping, such as: current big programming effort on 1, email and issue tracker on 2, source code main trunk on 3, smaller jobs on 4 and 5, release terminals on 6, web browser on 7, SQL terminal on 8.