One productivity hack I discovered for myself was to set my background to a solid color I like and to make my windowing experience as "boring" as possible. Id otherwise sit and tweak my UI instead of working.
This sort of project is quite possibly the next step in that optimization for myself.
My favourite, and I kinda miss it, was a neat little hack/exploit of a new Windows feature in 95/NT4 + PowerToys. It gained a new option to stretch the wallpaper to fit the screen resolution.
If you set the wallpaper to a tiny 2x3 BMP -- literally just a rectangle of 6 differently-coloured pixels -- then in its efforts to scale that, it turned the background into a cool smooth set of blends, just a wash of gradients.
It was attractive but totally undistracting, and a ~6 byte wallpaper file took an extremely small amount of RAM. :-)
Eventually, if I remember correctly, it got "fixed" and the scaling algorithm recognised sharply differing pixel colours and scaled them into GIIIAAANNNT PIIIXEEELLLS. :-(
I tried black, but it's easy to confuse for the monitor being off since I don't have any fixed elements on the screen.
*: Window Maker is a window manager under X11 with a NeXTStep-look-and-feel.
It was staggerging to me just how much easier it was to stop, breathe, take a moment to change my mind about the fact that some config needs changing, and instead just say "it's good enough".
example: https://files.catbox.moe/fr6hq9.png
There were few options, but I didn't need them. It worked fine for me out of the box. I add a few apps, a system monitor and I'm good to go.
Xfce is fine after about 10-15min's work, but Unity, for me, is set out of the metaphorical box.