I have a couple thoughts/suggestions but I’m also curious what others advise as I’m in a similar but different situation.
(My background/situation:
I used to use only one MacBook hooked up to monitors and external drives at my desk largely for this same reason—not being sure how to easily transfer work between two Macs. But especially the more I had to switch between being at my desk and going mobile, three things got annoying—the clutter of a dock and more cables to deal with, ejecting external drives each time, and fixing my window arrangement. macOS doesn’t seem to always know how to rearrange windows when a MacBook is sometimes connected/sometimes not connected to an external monitor, especially if you use multiple virtual desktops. It wasn’t terrible, but I found I’d often have to fix my window arrangement, and I guess that kind of thing really annoys me. And I found I wasn’t using my laptop as a laptop as much as I wanted to because of these hassles. So for all these and other reasons like better performance, for awhile I’ve been considering adding a desktop Mac. And I just got one, but unfortunately for my laptop I had to switch to a PC for a specific reason, so I don’t get some of the convenient Apple ecosystem features, eg. Airdrop. I’m still trying to work out the best workflow for me for switching between the two, but so far I think overall I’m liking having two dedicated devices.)
Arranging windows- as I mentioned above, I find it’s actually an advantage to have two dedicated devices when the screens are different sizes. You just set up your windows once for each and leave them. macOS never has to figure out what to do with windows when you switch between them, like it has to with one MacBook that is sometimes connected to an external monitor, sometimes not. This is good if, like me, you don’t often dramatically change your window arrangement. If you do then obviously you’d have to change your windows on your second Mac manually. But I’d think with the MacBook and external monitor having such different sized screens, they would need to be manually customized anyway.
Browser tabs- I recently realized the power of bookmark folders. You can easily save all your open tabs in a bookmark folder and name it your project name and the date, for example. And with Safari iCloud sync turned on on both devices, you can open all the tabs in that folder on either device.
Handoff is super convenient for opening an active application or document or browser tab on your second device, but the application has to support it and it only works with single items, not a group of open documents/photos. I’m not sure if any third party applications support Handoff.
If you’re working in something like Photoshop, maybe they have some cloud application you can work from. That would probably be the easiest way to be able to switch devices.
Next easiest would probably be to keep your entire project folder system in a cloud synced local folder (like Dropbox). It’ll sync your files in the background on both Macs so you just gotta close the files on one device and open them on the other.
And then if you don’t want to use cloud sync for whatever reason, you could just manually transfer. Easiest way to do that for Macs would be Airdrop. Way more convenient than say a thumb drive.
Personally I don’t want to use cloud, and actually I can’t because my work doesn’t allow it. I’d prefer to sync locally. I need to look into options like Synology.
Of course, there’s no perfect system, whether one or two Macs. Just gotta figure out which is best for you.
