People ignore some Smartlife advice because it messes with their established patterns, even though the whole point of staying alive is to make tomorrow better than today. Some advice seems like too much work, even though it saves time and energy in the longer run. And sometimes, just sometimes, the advice simply seems too good to be true: an excuse to indulge under the guise of efficiency. This is one such time. Buying a second monitor isn’t an obscene luxury or a greedy gadget grab; it really can improve your productivity.
Microsoft’s awesomely-acronymed Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment (VIBE) group has shown that larger screen area can significantly improve productivity. And by “significantly” we mean 10 to 50 percent depending on the task. And if you’re not interested in that, you actually are a gremlin, a fictional creature existing only to destroy progress. And most people seem to be said gremlins; the work was completed six years ago and we’re all still struggling in monoscreen sadness.
Obviously, “productivity” is a magical nothing-word which could mean anything to anyone. However, thinking about your equipment will make the advantages obvious. Your monitor isn’t just a “screen.” It’s part of the interface between a brilliant organic “computer” evolved over millions of years and an ultrafast electronic processor with network access to an incredible information archive. Your Internet connection speed is probably the most important aspect of your setup, both personally and professionally. You’d no more use a 56k modem than you’d send faxes by smoke signal. So why, after downloading megabytes of data per second all the way from across the world, would you send it the last foot over a small, dim, cathode-ray connection to your eyes?
It isn’t just the Internet. The screen really is your work area, and not just in the hardware. Your mind builds the picture of everything you’re doing in that space, seeing all the other applications either “behind” it or packed down into a corner. You wouldn’t work on a drawing board only eleven inches across; why would you construct every file you’ll ever use on the drafting equivalent of the back of a pygmy marmoset’s hand?
The original research involved a unique curved “DSHARP” monitor over a meter across, but multiple monitors are much more manageable and offer a lot of the same advantages. Different mental “panes” allow you to organize all your sources and programs, especially when you have to work between two or more at a time. On a single screen, alt-tabbing adds an extra step to every single operation. Reducing them in size to fit means you’re operating on two programs through tiny keyholes, constantly dragging scroll-bars left and right to find what you want.
The single screen forces you to think serially, clunking from one task to the next as you replace the entire work area instead of working in parallel between two (especially when you have to work between two applications which won’t talk to each other, often the case in offices where people work as organic adapters between databases and communications).
Source:http://smartlifeblog.com/the-productivity-power-of-two-computer-monitor-screens/
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