Workflo

Who It's For

Workflo is for people who repeatedly rebuild the same workspace by hand. Meetings and focus blocks are one version of that, but the triggers aren't only calendar events: Workflo watches the clock, your calendar, and display changes, so someone who docks at a desk in the morning and undocks in the afternoon gets the same benefit without a meeting involved. Rather than a tool you invoke to fix a scattered desktop, Workflo prepares the desktop for you ahead of time — it's aimed at users who'd rather their workspace be ready when they sit down than have to build it themselves every time.

It's also worth noting for the privacy-conscious: Workflo runs on the Accessibility permission alone and never requests Screen Recording, so it structurally cannot see the contents of any window.

How It Works

Workflo runs as a menu-bar app and watches three kinds of trigger: the system clock (a scheduled time), your calendar (an event with a video link coming up), and display changes (docking, undocking, or attaching a monitor). When a trigger fires, it activates a Scene — a saved collection of apps and window placements, named per workspace ("writing," "review," "monitoring"). Applying a Scene opens whichever apps aren't already running, places every window in its assigned position, and clears windows that don't belong to that Scene. Nothing happens silently: a cancelable countdown precedes every automatic change, so you can stop it or trigger the Scene manually with a hotkey instead of waiting. Scenes are designed on a canvas in Scene Studio, which supports dual-monitor layouts. Outside of scheduled Scenes, Stash (⌥⇧S) hides every window with one keystroke and restores them the same way, launch placement reopens new apps at a remembered position instead of macOS's default spot, and per-app rules let you exclude specific apps or preserve their sizes. When you dock, undock, or change displays, Workflo returns every window to its exact position within about a second. All of this runs on the Accessibility permission alone — Workflo never requests Screen Recording, which is the permission macOS requires to read pixels from a window. It can move, size, and hide windows, but it cannot see what's inside them.

Compared to Alternatives

Compared to Putback, which restores window positions when displays reconnect and layers named Scenes on top for manual recall, Workflo's Scenes are primarily calendar- and time-triggered rather than hotkey-first — it's built to fire automatically before a meeting rather than wait to be invoked. Compared to WindowRanger, which organizes windows into persistent virtual workspaces with Freeform, Tiled, or Accordion layout modes, Workflo doesn't offer distinct layout algorithms — it opens apps and places windows into fixed positions defined per Scene. Both Putback and Workflo restore exact window positions on display changes; Workflo's distinguishing feature is combining that with time- and calendar-triggered app launching. On permissions, Workflo sits with the tools that need only Accessibility — unlike window managers that draw live window previews or thumbnails (Wins, TelunKey, boringBar), which need Screen Recording to capture window contents, or Tatami, which uses Screen Recording deliberately to avoid touching SIP.

Requirements

• macOS 14 or later
• Accessibility permission required
• No Screen Recording permission requested
• No SIP disabling required
• $19.99 one-time purchase, 7-day free trial, no credit card required
• No subscription

Getting Started

Download from getworkflo.app and start the 7-day free trial — no card required. Grant Accessibility permission when prompted, then open Scene Studio to build your first Scene: add the apps you want, draw their window positions, and name it after the workspace it represents. Set a time, calendar, or display-change trigger for it, or assign it a hotkey to run manually. The changelog is at getworkflo.app/changelog.