Nothing
in cube-farm corporate America seems quite so decadent as
having two monitors on your desk. Who is this important person
who needs to work on two screens at the same time? Must be
some kind of bigshot, eh?
Not so, posits the
New York Times, which cites research that -- on
certain text-editing tasks -- users were 44 percent faster
using two 20-inch monitors instead of a single 18-inch screen.
While there are no hard data points in the piece regarding
other applications, it's not tough to see how users in all
manner of industries and all types of tasks could benefit from
having the extra LCD real estate. Anyone who has to flip back
and forth between multiple windows in order to access
information rather than keeping it all on the screen
simultaneously should be able to get a productivity boost from
having an extra display.
The
Times' Farhad Manjoo put multi-monitor work to the test in his
own workspace and notes that -- no matter what configuration
he put them in, and even if he just went to one large monitor
instead of two smaller ones -- he found his productivity
improved significantly. The big benefit? Always being able to
have your primary task visible and not covered up by off-topic
windows like web pages and IM sessions. Says Fanjoo, "A huge
desktop didn’t remove all distractions, but it blunted their
force. Now I could keep my e-mail and the Web open on one
screen while my Microsoft Word document ran on another. This
kept me on task. Even if I did go off to the Web, my document
was always visible, beckoning me to come back to
work."
I've
experienced similar results myself, though usually I use two
or three separate computers side by side instead of just a
bunch of monitors. Maybe I should rethink that strategy.
Hmmm.
For
a total maximum investment of about $500, Manjoo says he's
convinced that the multi-monitor setup is more than worth the
investment. Now let's see what your boss thinks about the
idea... (From Yahoo.com
1/16/2009)
