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Using Two Monitors Makes You More Productive?
Double Vision asks: "In my job, I work with several software applications at once. I find that constantly switching back and forth wastes a tremendous amount of time and causes me to lose focus. My video card supports two monitors, so I found a discarded monitor in my office and hooked it up. This has made it much easier to do my job. However, we are getting ready to go through an equipment audit, which means I will likely lose my additional monitor unless I can justify keeping it. How can I make this case? Is anyone aware of studies that support my claim that two monitors makes me more productive?"
If you merely spend five additional minutes on work each day that you would have had to spend on shuffling windows around, the investment in an additional monitor will pay for itself within weeks.
At my previous job I was also using 2 monitors, which definitely made me more productive as I could more easily compare information on different screens.
At my current job I only have 1 monitor and it took me a while to get used to it again. I would ask for a second screen but I already know the answer... "No, because otherwise everyone would want a second screen."
While on my departement, everyone would be better of with having a second screen, the average amount of windows open at the same time is at least 10. It would definitely increase productivity but explaining this to management who at most have their e-mail and text processor open is a lost cause I fear. Well, at least at home I have 2 screens to enjoy.
Also, on a related note, I found synergy to be an amazing tool when using multiple computers at the same time. It allows you to share the same mouse and keyboard between multiple computers by sending the signal over the network and it behaves just as if you had multiple screens on 1 computer (move between screens by going to the side of the screen). I haven't used it for a while though because I didn't have to work on multiple computers at the same time. But if you are, definitely check it out!
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I spend a reasonable amount of time in RDP (Remote Desktop) sessions to clients MS Windows servers. Things are better these days but a few years ago we had a lot of customers on fairly slow connections, and RDP, being the wonderful protocol it is, wants to redraw whenever you bring it to the front.
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So I would connect, log in, then wait for a a minute or two for the screen to draw (remember, I am normally connecting in to solve a problem, so performance is often much worse than normal!) then slowly try and figure out what is going on.
What made it horribly sucky was that I couldn't minimize the RDP window while it did it's thing, otherwise it would just start to redraw again. With a second screen I could just put the RDP session there and let it do its thing!
Just recently I have been porting an older C++ application to C#. I have the source code for each application on each screen, way faster than trying to flip between them on a single screen.
The nice thing is, this works so well _because_ they are two separate screens. Having one screen that was twice as wide just wouldn't be the same (unless it functioned as two screens of course
My setup is my 15" laptop display and a 17" CRT, both running 1024x768 resolution. I'm almost thinking I should track down a USB VGA adapter and run a 3rd screen. Performance might suck (being USB instead of PCI) but i wouldn't be doing anything on that display where that was an issue.
Hmmm... here's a more interesting question. At what number of screens does productivity start to drop? I guess the answer will depend on what tasks you are doing but it would sure make an interesting study... I'm imagining 3 screens across and 2 screens high as a starting point
I had the same thing. I took a spare CRT, and my boss at the time really liked the setup, so he got me matching 17" LCD's. One of my coworkers also got matching 17's. My old boss now has 4 monitors, 2 19" LCD's, a 17", and a widescreen 24. He only really does work on 2 of them, the 17 is for viewing our internal help desk website for new tickets, and the widescreen is for our camera DVR system. My new boss now has a 19" LCD to connect to his laptop, and we are talking about pushing 2 monitors down to some of the regular non-IT employees in certain positions where they would benefit.
It's nice to work in an environment where people recognize potential productivity increase when they see it. 17" LCDs are cheap now. Easily $150 or less. A spare video card or a dual vid card can be cheap, I spent $35 on the one I use at work.
If you job complains about spending $150 on a long term investment in your productivity, then you should start looking for a new job. Of course, people are giving away CRTs all the time, you could always offer to bring one in. Check freecycle.
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I actually had your post down as interesting rather than funny, but in any case, I doubt it will ever happen.
As anyone involved with typography and graphic design can tell you, the length of text lines that humans can read comfortably is pretty short. Guidelines vary, some based around numbers of alphabets set at a typical reading size, some more formally expressed in terms of angles through which the eyes move. The end results are fairly consistent, though: on a modern 19" monitor, with a full-screen window open, at a typical resolution of say 1280x960, and with the user sitting at a typical distance from the screen, the text is already far too wide for most people to read it optimally.
Now, programmers perhaps suffer less from this than those working with ordinary text documents, because most programming languages use some form of indentation to represent things like block structure. Thus the lines within any given block -- those which the programmer will most likely want to read over in sequence -- tend to be shorter. Even so, it's also undesirable to nest too deeply in most programming languages, which limits the effect of this style. So, while old guidelines about 80 character line lengths are rare these days, restricting individual lines to 80 characters between their first and last visible text probably isn't a bad idea.
In other words, I don't think most programmers will ever write lines much longer than they do today, no matter how big monitors get. It will simply be uncomfortable to read them, and therefore they will adopt a different style where lines are broken at natural places, just as mathematicians have long done when typesetting equations.
And yes, this does all have implications for window managers, particularly as widescreen monitors seem to be becoming more popular on both desktops and laptops. I'm slightly surprised that the mainstream hasn't yet given up on the idea of maximising a window to the full screen, and provided some concept of zones, so you can lock a window to fill exactly the left or right half of your monitor, say. Such a viewable area is far more useful on the sort of physical sizes and resolutions that are seen for high-end screens today, for everything from web browsing to editing documents, and even for code on the wider screens.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Two is better than one. No questions asked. Tiling windows sucks. With two monitors, your windows will automatically maximize to a single monitor, making it quite easy to get full screen apps on both screens at once. I've tried the large monitor thing, and you spend more time fooling around with window placement. With two monitors, much of that ends up being handled for you. I'm actually at the point where I'm ready for a 3rd monitor, I'm just afraid to ask for it - I figure it will become a spectacle.
Why stop at 4? How about 13? Or 18? Or 21?
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I use a Matrox Parhelia at work and Matrox's TripleHead2Go at home for Triplehead. Right now I'm using 3072x768, using one new and two secondhand Dell/BenQ 15" LCD panels. At work it's 3840x1024, using one LCD panel and two old CRTs.
Contrary to what many others have said, I find that one of the major benefits of Matrox's triplehead implementation is that as far as Windows is concerned it's one screen. This not only provides maximum compatibility with software not properly written to cope with multihead, but it means I can easily grab the entire three screens for, say, a wide Excel spreadsheet, Photoshop, or some complicated bit of code. Matrox do provide software to make the single desktop behave like three screens for the purposes of maximising windows, but I have that turned off.
The 17" and 20" widescreen combination does work fairly well, but I must point out that 1280x1024 isn't really a standard format. It's actually a wierd 5:4 aspect ratio, and the only place I have ever seen a 5:4 aspect ratio is with 1280x1024 screens. 1280x1024 should really be 1280x960, which is a proper 4:3 ratio, and is the resolution CRTs should be set at so the image is not stretched.