My company does a lot of international work, so I have a row of clocks at different world times set up in a neat row. I also managed to find an old installer for istatpro's widget, which is still my favorite widget of all time (lots of computer usage information at a quick glance, very slim and real time). When I still had a mac as my work computer, I used the calendar widget frequently. I also had some webpage made widgets of our Salesforce reports and tools to quickly reference without having to open a tab for salesforce or keep it open elsewhere; the periodic snapshot of the page was enough. I keep a 5 day weather forecast up as well with some basic weather information.

I use it as...a dashboard honestly. Every time I find myself frequently searching for common information, I find a widget for it and swipe over quickly. They use almost no resources, they're always fast to update when I need the information, and they're out of the way. Maybe it's just because I was really excited about Dashboard from way back when and it's part of my workflow, but I find it super useful still for managing a lot of "often needed needed but not in real-time" data points on a single laptop screen.