I currently feel as though I don't really use Plasma and plasmoids up to their full potential - which is a bit disheartening, as Plasma is (I believe) what is meant to be (one of the things that are) revolutionary about the KDE 4.x desktop experience.

I do, however have 4 desktop activities of which I am able to switch between using an autohidden panel on the top of my screen. One is a plain wallpaper with an analog clock, another boasts system statistics (temperature, cpu - which I use every so often when optimising) and a sticky note (empty most of the time), the third is a traditional desktop folderview, which I hardly use but keep for keeps sake, and the fourth contains four folder view plasmoids of my most commonly accessed folders which allow me to easily transfer files from one area to another to categorise them.

One reason for my underutilisation of plasma would definitely be that when I'm working on something, I run it full screen (eg: when programming Vim is full screen, or Firefox is full screen when web browsing). There is no shortcut (or none that I have found) which allows me to quickly Show Desktop (not Show Dashboard). The reason I say Show Desktop is what I need is because in the Show Dashboard, it doesn't allow me to access my autohidden panel on the top which allows me to switch activities. (Possible glitch/feature suggestion?) The absence of such a shortcut means that when doing keyboard heavy tasks, I find it a huge hassle to use my mouse to have to go to the "Show Desktop" button (which I have to add and takes up space on my panel) when I want to quickly use my plasmoids.

What I am curious of is how you guys are using plasmoids. How useful are they to you? Are they integrated into your workflow (as I believe it should be - but isn't for me)? Which plasmoids do you use? Are activities proving useful? Perhaps this might unearth some less common uses of plasmoids that might be useful for users like me who believe they are not fully realising Plasma's potential.

Looking forward to your comments.

You don't need a panel to switch activities. You can step through your activities with Ctrl-Shift-P (previous) and Ctrl-Shift-N (next)

This also works when showing the Dashboard (which can also be done with a shortcut, I set mine to Super-Alt-D).

My plasmoids:
Battery-meter / access to Powerdevil
RSS Now
Sticky notes
CPU - Network - Disk meter
Folder view
Fuzzy clock

And of course taskbar, systray and pager