Yeah, that's essentially the right way (I use conda envs, but venvs are probably fine too). Have one env for running the Jupyter Lab/Notebook server (install jupyter, jupyter widgets, nbextensions, etc into this env) and then create other envs for your projects and register that kernel with jupyter [0]. You can also just install all of the jupyter ide cruft in each env if you want, but dependencies can get annoying.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39604271/conda-environme....