A Myth of Productivity: Multiple Monitors Are Hurting You (2023)

The "perceived benefits" of being able to see more things at once might really be an illusion if they're just a firehose of distractions.

Less so when the things in question are "an error log next to the bug I'm filing about it", or "program output and the program I'm iterating on" or "the total state of production while I'm deploying code" or "chat with team members while I'm reacting to an incident and don't have the mental bandwidth for extra context switching". A really powerful tiling WM with desktops that can be independently switched between a couple of monitors is pretty much a superpower in these situations.

TFA seems overconfident and mistaken in its assumptions.

I generally agree except for this point:

> Somehow, we convinced ourselves that turning our necks back and forth is superior to simply resizing windows to smaller sizes so they can be next to each other on a single screen, allowing us to move our eyes quickly without risking a neck injury.

This is basically the same as having multiple screens.

I think where screens help is when they let you avoid a context switch.

So for me if I'm modifying a class and I have to edit class.h, class.cc, as well as wherever it goes I like to have them all open at once so I don't have to hold that context in my head.

As a software and web developer, I frequently need to keep my eye on several things at once, including the code, reference documentation and research, diffs, database tables/structure, you name it.

Four primary monitors in a row are ideal for me: two natively-vertical monitors (1536×2048) in the middle (yes, these do exist for medical applications, the trick is in finding them in colour and not B&W), and two landscape monitors (1920×1200) in the wings.

My fifth and sixth monitors are up above the first four, and are for less-frequent data that might need occasional but immediate referencing. I use those for long-running dashboards and such.

Now granted, if I was doing a lot simpler of a job - data entry or other office work - then sure. I could probably run with just two monitors or even one. Alt+tab isn’t frustrating if you only ever switch between two or three applications all day long. But for what I do? Naw, dog. I consider four to be the functional minimum.

I guess my only issue is that I frequently lose my mouse across all those screens, and my Kensington Expert Mouse is getting so old that it frequently sends the cursor skittering off in random directions even when the trackball hasn’t been touched. PowerToys has this awesome tool where the cursor can be highlighted with a CTRL double-tap, I only wish I could set it to activate whenever the cursor is physically moving, no keyboard press needed.

I've realised this a long time ago and I think it's because I have some sort of ADD so the issue was amplified.

I joke with colleagues that I'm like a horse that needs blinders. I absolutely just need to focus on one thing at the time, multiple monitors or huge monitors never helped me do that. Sometimes I would find myself lost between looking at one and the other. I haven't used more than one monitor for over a decade now and I will never go back to too much screen real estate.

I was genuinely getting neck pain at one point from using two monitors and going back and forth. I now mostly just use my laptop screen with a large screen for coding and running debuggers. A single large screen IMO is more effective than a bunch of screens.

Our Devops people often had multiple monitors setup, with crazy specific window management to keep 10 terminal windows visible at all times. None of the windows ever showed anything useful, and when you actually worked with them, everything was done in a single terminal window, on a single remote machine.

Their tickets still took forever to be worked. Some people are just more obsessed about "optimizing" their tools than actually using them.

A notebook meanwhile is super duper useful.

IMHO one of the main drivers for multiple monitors today is the wasteful use of whitespace in UI design, which requires having large windows and lots of screen estate (without actually having a lot of information)

I could see this on Mac laptops since you can swipe around easily, but I’m loving my three vertical ultrawides side by side because you can have a whole monitor for docs, one for code, one for terminal, then you only need to save a file and saccade your eyes to see the test results if you’re using a test runner like nodemon or cargo watch

I feel like the time when three monitors were ideal there were a lot fewer distractions on the computer. It was more about having a terminal open, your code, and maybe a browser/manual for looking up API calls. Now as the article mentions it is slack, youtube and probably social media.

For me at least this is just silly. I have vscode up, the browser (which I need to refresh often), and relevant documentation.

I have 2 large monitors. When I just had one it was a constant frustration. I couldn't remember where anything was, I'd open up the wrong windows etc.

Never would I go back to one monitor

I would like to see some research done on the long-term impact on the spine of constantly turning your head from left to right all day, every day for years (decades?) as happens when using multiple monitors.

It has to accelerate the degradation of the cervical discs in the neck.

Dual monitors are very useful when you have one window you are working on 80% of the time reference material you look at 20% of the time. It is quicker to look over than to flip through 20 open programs to find the reference material.

This is highly contextual. My previous job was hell without extra display. It's bad enough having to shift between : 1. Mainframe DB 2. Web (with 3-4 "apps" open in tabs - including one of our primary tools, various pages to lookup data, mapping system, knowledgebase reference, etc... 3) Terminal Software to log into multiple switching systems (each with their own syntax thus needing the knowledgebase) 4) Teams Chat 5) Mail (neither 4 or 5 these "require" multiple screens and can be shunted down into the taskbar) 6) A chat client (when acting as support/to request support) - Browser based, but kept in a separate window because it is a separate function than just "referring to info/looking info up) Most of this was on one screen but the Browser I always had to keep open on a second screen so I could have it handy to swing to it when needed and not waste minimize/maximize. 7) VOIP software for telephony.

I believe there were other tools (I am no longer at this job, and can't recall them all).

I just know that even on a 1440 screen there was no way working with one monitor would be pleasant. Some people ran multiple DB terminals separately (IBM mainframes); I just switched DBs in the terminal (you could have up to 5 open at a time - but sometimes you'd be working multiple projects and it's easier for some people to just load a second window) If I ran more than one at a time, like others did, that would be yet more complexity.

I can imagine most places only need a few windows open at a time (ultimately that's what you did, because too much info at a time is just as bad as too little) Frankly, I would need a 4k bigass display to really have nicely tiled windows that did everything I needed to without stacking window managers making everything so complex)

The overhead of keeping track of state of all these things and swapping between them quickly was brutal and that's without the actual work done on them. Multi-tasking is a huge pain in the ass.

>TL;DR Multiple screens are bad for you. Let me try to convince you.

Then, that's inviting me to read the whole article to get to the answer, which i found very inconclusive.

*At least the tldr was at the beginning instead of at the end.

I am leery about how they sweep the documentation use case under the implied rug of "just put the docs and your ide together on the same tiny laptop screen".

This makes even less sense in visual arts work, where having a second monitor for reference materials is always helpful.

My ide often needs to show multiple modules and a console, or else I'm constantly context shifting. So I benefit from a larger main canvas. Likewise, I also need to show API docs. Maybe two or three sets of them. This is like my palette and tool board.

I need serious space, because my working memory can only hold 2 or 3 facts. When I'm working in a serious context, I need to wrangle maybe 20 different facts - say 5 facts from one API doc, 5 facts from another, and so on. It helps to have all the references displayed at once. That way, when I'm working on a detail, I can easily pick up a little color - an important fact I forgot - just by looking at the pallete.

If I'm working on a smaller screen, API docs and IDE become too crowded. I must scroll to find key facts, or jump between windows and tabs. In each case, context thrashing increases. I actually forget things while context switching, leading to extra jumps to recall something that was just on screen a second ago. As a result I can't get as many facts into my brain, the work is very slow, it's not fun, and I'm likely to quit in favor of something more engaging and fun.

My diagnosis? The author understands the bane of context shifting and distractions, but they might not experience the struggle of tackling complex contexts with exceptionally poor working memory, and needing cleanly organized tools and reference materials in order to enter a fun and fully absorbed flow state.

In order to help me streamline my workflow and feel less of a need for a second screen, I invite the author to demonstrate how they track five or six complex documents on a small screen, without making the view ports so small that it incurs constant scrolling, window focusing, and other context thrashing. Failing that, I think the author can be more accommodating of other people's work styles and challenges.