In this guide
Visible windows are open loops
A window you can see is a task you have not finished thinking about. The Slack sidebar in the corner of your vision is not neutral furniture; it is a standing invitation, and your attention accepts it roughly every ninety seconds. The usual response is a notification-blocking app, which mutes the alerts but leaves the windows in view.
Removing the window is more effective than silencing it. A deep work layout is therefore very simple: one window occupying the whole screen, everything else behind it. The difficulty has never been the concept — it is that entering and leaving that state manually is annoying enough that people stop doing it. Rectangle reduces both transitions to a single keystroke, which is the entire trick.
The point is symmetry. Entering focus is easy in any system; it is the cost of coming back that determines whether you use it again tomorrow. If restoring your working layout takes thirty seconds of dragging, you will avoid the mode altogether.
Three focus modes worth having
Solitary. One window, maximised, nothing else. Best for drafting, coding a well-understood change, or reading something long. Enter with the maximise shortcut, leave by restoring the previous layout.
Paired. Two windows, an even split — the thing you are making beside the thing you are referencing. A document and its source, an editor and its output, a translation and its original. This is the most common real working state for knowledge work and it deserves a dedicated shortcut pair rather than a drag.
Centred. One window sized to roughly two thirds and centred, with wallpaper visible on both sides. Sounds cosmetic; is not. A full-width text window on a 27-inch display produces lines so long that your eye loses its place returning to the left margin. Centring at a comfortable measure is a legitimate readability intervention, and Rectangle app for Mac has a dedicated shortcut for it.
The restore shortcut is the important one
Underused and quietly essential: restore returns a window to the size and position it had before the last snap. It is what makes focus mode reversible. Maximise the editor, work for an hour, restore — and the window is back where it was, not approximately but exactly.
Without it, every focus session ends with a small reconstruction job, and the friction accumulates until you stop bothering. With it, focus becomes a mode you enter a dozen times a day without thinking about it. If you take one habit from the Rectangle window manager for Mac, make it this pair: maximise to go in, restore to come out.
Timeboxing with layout as the signal
Layout is a better commitment device than a timer alone. Pair them: when the timer starts, the screen goes to a single window; when it ends, the full layout comes back. After a week the arrangement itself becomes the cue, in the same way that sitting at a particular desk signals work to people who never intended to train themselves that way.
- Draft block — one maximised writing window, notes hidden entirely.
- Review block — halves: the draft and the comments.
- Comms block — thirds: mail, chat and calendar visible simultaneously, contained to a fixed slot in the day.
- Research block — two thirds for the source, one third for the notes file.
Notice that the communications block is a layout too. Focus systems fail when they have no legitimate place for the interrupting work; giving messages a defined shape and a defined time is more sustainable than pretending they do not exist.
Doing it without a second monitor
Most focus advice quietly assumes hardware. On a single laptop display, the equivalent of a second monitor is disciplined switching between a small number of remembered arrangements. Three is enough for almost everyone: maximised, halves, and thirds.
macOS Spaces complement this well. Keep one Space per project, each with its own arrangement, and swipe between contexts rather than rebuilding them. Rectangle applies per Space, so each context can hold a different layout and none of them decay while you are elsewhere.
Rectangle is free and open source
Halves, thirds, quarters and sixths from the keyboard, on any Mac. No trial, no account.
Download Rectangle for Mac →Frequently asked questions
Is a window manager really necessary for focus?
Necessary, no. But it removes the main reason people abandon focus modes: the cost of getting back to a normal working layout afterwards.
What about macOS native full screen?
Native full screen moves the app to its own Space and hides the menu bar, which is heavier than most sessions need. Maximising within the current Space keeps switching fast and reversible.
How many layouts should I actually memorise?
Three or four. People who try to learn all twenty shortcuts at once typically use none of them a week later.