Photoshop Workspace

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down (Here's How I Fixed Mine)
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down (Here's How I Fixed Mine)

I work almost exclusively from coffee shops. Not because I’m trying to look interesting, but because something about ambient noise and a flat white keeps me locked in. The problem is that screen real estate in a coffee shop is whatever your laptop gives you, and on a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the default Photoshop workspace is basically a panel explosion with a tiny canvas somewhere in the middle. For the first two years of freelancing, I just… lived with it.

Your Photoshop Workspace is a Mess — Here's How I Fixed Mine in 20 Minutes
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace is a Mess — Here's How I Fixed Mine in 20 Minutes

I spent the better part of a Tuesday afternoon last month looking for the Properties panel. Not because it was hidden. Not because I’d closed it. It was open the whole time, just buried under three other panels on my secondary monitor in a configuration I’d apparently set up sometime in 2021 and never touched since. Meanwhile, the client on the other end of a Slack thread was waiting for a mockup revision that should have taken seven minutes.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How I Fixed Mine
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How I Fixed Mine

I used to work with the default Photoshop workspace like some kind of masochist. Every panel Adobe ships turned on, the Properties panel eating half my screen, the Tools bar sitting on the left like it owned the place. I’d be mid-composite at some coffee shop on South Congress, squinting at a 13-inch MacBook screen with roughly the same usable canvas space as a Post-it note. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that a cluttered workspace isn’t just annoying.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How to Fix It in 20 Minutes
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How to Fix It in 20 Minutes

I once watched myself spend six minutes looking for the Properties panel during a client screen share. Six minutes. The client was on the call. I was clicking through every nested panel group like a raccoon digging through trash, making small apologetic noises while my billable hour evaporated in real time. That was the day I stopped treating workspace setup as something I’d “get to eventually” and started treating it like the actual work.