Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have always been curious.. is there a better way of accomplishing this?
Start by not relying on Full Disk Encryption, which you should absolutely have enabled but should probably, from an OPSEC perspective, pretend does not exist. On modern operating systems you can generally mount and unmount virtual encrypted volumes that are open (ideally) only when you're actually using them to do work with their contents. There used to be a great macOS tool, called Knox, that did this graphically.
Right now it's just for sensitive documents (i.e., anything that could be used to steal my identity). I used to also store my passwords in an encrypted directory, but now I've migrated to a password manager (which of course has an encrypted database).
If someone steals my computer while it's on and the drive is decrypted, they won't be able to obtain the most sensitive information the vast majority of the time.