Everyone has their style...for me it's:

Xmonad, a tiling window manager on Linux, that has gmrun on a keyboard shortcut, open terminal as another, and using remind+dzen for meeting notifications, and mutt for email.

Tiling window managers are great now that big wide monitors are becoming the norm.

My desktop looks a little strange, and perhaps mutt is a little ancient, but its hard to argue that it isn't productive.

Its still a work in progress...I'd love to be able to sync better with Google Calendar and use gcalcli to bring it all back down in daily agenda emails....