How to set up PATH ??

[joe at actionline.com]

My backup computer system has this version:
Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa

How can I edit .profile so it will find all
of my shell script utilities in /home/joe/path ??

I tried adding the 4 "set PATH" lines shown below, but it does not work:

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.

# the default umask is set in /etc/profile; for setting the umask
# for ssh logins, install and configure the libpam-umask package.
#umask 022

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
     # include .bashrc if it exists
     if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
	. "$HOME/.bashrc"
     fi
fi

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
     PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

======= Also, I cannot find where to add desktops (workspaces)
in this version of linux.