Nice. My solution to this (on arch linux) was to maintain a script that would open the stuff I need on specific workspaces. I'd always need the following to get work done:

1. Browser on workspace 1 2. Pycharm/IDE on workspace 2 3. Terminals ssh-ed into the compute server on workspace 3 4. Workspace 4 is empty - I use this as my scratch workspace 5. Workspace 5 contains slack and spotify

i3 provides you a way to map each application to each workspace. So it was pretty easy to get ^ this setup at the press of a button.