I found that I hated working with lots of windows as have many others. However, I came to realize that this is because of the window manager. I switched to a window manager capable of actually managing windows, and will never go back. The particular window manager I use is called Awesome, but there are many like it. A particularly useful feature is Awesome's use of tags. Multiple tags can be assigned to windows, and multiple windows can be assigned to tags, and at any one time, you can view whichever combination of tags you want. I have a tag for work, a tag for personal, a tag for news. I also have a tag for web, a tag for communications, and a tag for production. Viewing combinations of these tags is extremely useful and an effective way of managing windows.