The thing I found that made me finally come to grips with screen was turning on the status line at the bottom to show you how many windows you have open. Here’s the relevant lines from my .screenrc; you’ll want to tune the ‘hardstatus string’ setting to your liking (see the screen(1) manpage section on STRING ESCAPES):

hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string “%{.ky}%-w%{.bW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a ”

You can then rename a window with ‘ctrl-a A’ to name it something more meaningful.

The easiest, of course, is just to hit ‘a’ again after C-a (C-a a).
The second is to specify a different control character when starting screen. (-e^Aa specifies “a”, which is default)