I wonder if this is relevant to tech workers. Does a second monitor - if not used as a productivity boost, but rather a neutral convenience - hinder your capability to focus on tasks? Should we turn it off to properly focus?
I have suspected this might be the case for a while, but I'm not aware that it is obvious.
I went from two screens back to one with a tiling window manager.
What I was finding, was each tab/window/screen swap was a chance to lose focus. In practice I do lose focus a lot if I'm switching between screens.
I don't have the same issue with tiles, and I can also setup workspaces to act a bit like focus rooms. I do a lot of little things to retain focus, another one is removing the mouse from my workflow as much as possible as it feels kind of like taking your hands off the wheel to fiddle with the car stereo. You switch mode, and that can disrupt focus.
I have a friend with 4 monitors. I've set at his desk and the feeling is very similar to a tanning bed.
I don't know that he actually needs those monitors, he seems to end up watching e-sports during his work day, though it hasn't affected his career as far as I know. But then he's well above average so even coasting he's doing more than most.
I really have trouble justifying more than two, unless I'm working on a project with DevOps responsibilities.
There are several windows you need and 'losing' one is more problematic for some people than others.
You need to write code. You need to test the code you just wrote. You need source material for writing new code (docs, bug dbs, stack overflow), and you need windows for any background tasks you're responsible for.
Since source material and testing tend not to overlap, one monitor for both usually works out pretty well. A third monitor, oriented it portrait mode, can usually accommodate enough windows to monitor logs or grafana dashboards. Giving over a spare monitor to it improves the gestalt and increases the odds that you will look at it on an interval that your boss approves of. With a wider (taller when rotated) monitor you can fit 2 dashboards with a little room left over to see the rate of new logs - when things are scrolling too fast or too slow that can indicate a problem with the system before it shows on the graphs.
With a big enough primary monitor, I could do with just 2 (and would have to - my 2nd monitor already hangs off the end of my desk). But at 32" I don't feel I have the space to lose it. Also the 2nd monitor has my only video camera.
Oh I totally should have mentioned, I went from two 24"@ 1080p each to a single 34" at QHD as they call it. So a significant real-estate increase was required to manage one monitor.
I don't use it like two monitors in one. Usually my code editor is two thirds of the screen wide, application I am testing is one third,then terminal windows are across the whole bottom of the screen at about a quarter of the bottom of the screen.
So you are right you do tend to need those things in easy view, and I have achieved that but slightly differently to a multi-monitor setup.
I don't know about other people, but I seem to be able to focus more with visual and auditory noise. Something to do with "stochastic resonance"?
A quick search yields:
> Beneficial effects of noise on higher cognition have recently attracted attention. Hypothesizing an involvement of the mesolimbic dopamine system and its functional interactions with cortical areas, the current study aimed to demonstrate a facilitation of dopamine-dependent attentional and mnemonic functions by externally applying white noise in five behavioral experiments.
> ..These results suggest that white noise has no general effect on cognitive functions.
> Perceptual decision-making relies on the gradual accumulation of noisy sensory evidence. It is often assumed that such decisions are degraded by adding noise to a stimulus, or to the neural systems involved in the decision making process itself. But it has been suggested that adding an optimal amount of noise can, under appropriate conditions, enhance the quality of subthreshold signals in nonlinear systems, a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance.
I've noticed that I get very distracted by motion in my peripheral vision, but not by static images. So I can use a second monitor for things like documentation, but not something like Slack that shows new messages, animated gifs/emojis, etc.
I've also configured my text editor to be very "static": when I type, the only things that can happen are the cursor moves, or text is inserted. I have to manually trigger things like the autocompletion popup, LSP checks, or highlighting the symbol under the cursor.
This reminds me of some of the early linting tools that emerged around the time ES5 / node.js was blowing up. I found the defaults to be insanely distracting, giving me warnings about unused variables etc as I was still typing the code (of course it's unused, I just defined it!)
GitHub Copilot is similar, defaulting to provide suggestions to finish your LOC whenever you stop typing. While the AI tools can be very useful, the benefit is lost if I can't focus on what I'm writing.
That's one of the reasons I use Vim. It does absolutely nothing without an input and has nothing unnecessary on the screen. Unfortunately pretty much all modern editors and IDEs aim for the exact opposite, the last time I tried VS Code it even had a button floating above the code for some git related stuff.
So far I haven't seen a piece of software that tries to do everything under the sun while also being enjoyable to use.
