There were a few 'solutions' that I was content with. You can have a workspace where you have these things (htop, other monitoring tools) and you can also have it in your vim/emacs status-line if you want to keep track of it while working.

I've never actually found that I need something _everywhere_ as much as I need to have it _somewhere_. Monitoring of things like these included.

Edit: I hesitate to call them real solutions, because obviously they are not for everyone. Some people need to see their CPU/RAM usage, network usage, clock and battery level at all times.