Discussion

Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

makeitrain: I’ve had a 38” ultrawide for about a decade.I’d say monitor position and ergonomics matter way more than screen size.Navigating a stack of apps with alt+tab, ctrl+tab is extremely efficient. I only miss the extra space when looking at spreadsheets or comparing things in different windows.Some laptops have a pitiful screen height, avoid those.Ultrawide is an extra screen size that many web devs forget about. Good design can take advantage of it. But some fluid designs look terrible without constraints.I ran a vertical setup, with a monitor above my laptop. Not a bad way to go if you want more space for auxiliary apps.Focus is essential for productivity. Do whatever it takes to get there.

gambutin: Being able to de-focus is actually quite useful.Imagine sitting through those lengthy team calls and having to concentrate on BS for 1-2 hours.Nah, I’d rather focus on getting things done in the meantime.

jasonpeacock: I just upgraded to a 49" curved display because it lets me view everything I need _for the current task_ at one time.One virtual desktop is Messages, Slack, and Outlook for all my comms needs.Another is IDE & browser for development work.Another is todo list, planner, notes, and browser for task management.Having to constantly swap app between browser, email, IDE, slack, etc is interruptive. Being able to switch to a single-focus desktop with everything visible is much more productive for me and reduces context switching.

bitwize: Oooooh, 30. Getting up there, old man! Wait till you hit your 40s and your vision starts going... you're gonna want a big-ass monitor then!

SoftTalker: Just get reading glasses. You'll need them anyway.

bluefirebrand: > Focus is essential for productivity. Do whatever it takes to get there.I'm posting this because it's something I went through in my career and I hope it helps someone who is in a similar situationI was undiagnosed ADHD until my 30s. In high school and university I was able to brute force my way through and get reasonably good grades. I had a really rocky start to my career in software. I was always getting middling performance reviews along the lines of "You're really good when you're working, but your productivity is terrible". Meanwhile my stress level was crazy high despite not exactly doing lots of overtime or anything elseEven treated, ADHD can make focus very difficult. Undiagnosed, it is devastatingBringing it back to the words I quoted, I agree entirely. Focus is essential for productivity. Part of doing whatever it takes to get there might mean getting diagnosed and medicated

psyclobe: I will never give up my 5k2k LG 32 inch lcd. Single is best I do agree.

prhn: I learned this lesson a couple decades ago.Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.However, I've also learned recently it depends what you're doing.Software development, I just want one single maximized window on a single laptop monitor. If I have a near-retina DPI monitor with 120hz+ (I can't deal with low DPI fuzziness and low refresh all day) I'll usually have a 3-4 window layout on a single monitor with the IDE taking up half the screen.There is a minor cognitive hit from switching focus between monitors for things like reading documentation, so I don't like doing that.Music production? Man, I could probably use like 3+ monitors. Main stems view, a separate monitor for open VSTs, a separate monitor for video, a separate one for piano roll maybe. The window juggling gets really cumbersome on a single monitor.My friend who is a professional musician (makes music for TV shows) uses 3 large TVs for music production.

antonvs: > Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.Tiling window managers are a good solution.

2OEH8eoCRo0: I went the other direction. I bought a Dell 40" for productivity and I feel like the increased real estate only clutters and distracts.

kanbankaren: That is very big. You would end up getting neck pain as you have to physically move your head to look at extremities of the screen.I use a 32" monitor and I find that I use only the center of the screen. I would downsize if not for vertical real estate.

2OEH8eoCRo0: I've had it two years, no strain. I don't have to move my head to look around.I do mostly use the center of the screen and try to keep my current "work" centered with extra stuff on the periphery.

deep_noz: reading the title I thought it's a relationship advice...

ronb1964: I went the opposite direction. I'm running a 45" LG UltraGear curved ultrawide OLED at 3440x1440. At first I thought the real estate would make me more productive. What actually happened is I have apps spread across the whole thing and spend more time rearranging windows than working. The article makes a fair point — a smaller screen forces you to commit to one thing at a time. I'm not ready to give mine up, but I can't argue with the logic."

UnhappyMeaning: I've tried every set up that I have the privilage of having:- 11in Macbook Air- 16in Macbook Pro- 1 X 27in monitor mounted with MB Pro in clamshell mode- Linux Mint desktop on old Dell Inspiron with 4gb of RAMand after using all of these to try and increase my productivity, I'm still the unfocused and possibly ADD riddled human and maybe I'm not cut from the same cloth as my other productive peers.

Kuyawa: I've used a cheap 50" TV as monitor for almost a decade now and I can't complain. Sight is 20/20 at 60yo, no eye strain, no headaches, nothing. I only use it for coding (sublime) and browsing (brave), so I don't care about resolution/retina/pixels/colors/curvature/etc.

kartoffelsaft: Tiling merely changes the idiosyncrasies, and I say this as someone who primarily uses them. (hyprland in my case)If you created a window right now, where will it go? Which window will it take its space from? Does it use your focused window? Your mouse position? If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them? etc. That's all cognitive load when you aren't familiar and still requires some hand control when you are.

convexly: Went from ultrawide back to my 27 inch monitor and definitely feel more focused. Having everything open "just in case" was killing my output. Nothing alt+tab can't fix.

aenis: I was wondering about this for a while now.My main home office has 5 monitors, and i still have to swipe between desktops regularly. I used to have 6, but two ultrawides stacked one above the other was a bit painful and I developed a back pain after a while.My on the road setup typically involves a folding portable monitor (asus zenscreen duo, or something to that effect - that is 2x 1080p). Easily enough, and I don't really see a decrease in my efficiency.But I sometimes do long distance flights and then I code/work on a single screen. I absolutely can do the same thing that I can do with my 6 screen setup with almost not noticeable effect on productivity as well. Could it be that the extra screens are just useless and an illusion of added productivity?

Xcelerate: It depends what I'm working on. If it's a bunch of interdependent systems that involve a large amount of data, a giant monitor is better. If the giant monitor is being used to make visible more application surfaces (Slack, email, VS Code, etc.), it makes focus worse.The biggest improvement I've found for my focus is to force myself to close any open tabs/windows that are not absolutely necessary roughly every two hours. I used to be one of those people with 800 tabs open in the browser and 20 application windows spread across 8 desktop spaces. Was a concentration mess. Requiring myself to "clean up" periodically has really helped.

0xfaded: The MacOS window manager is so bad that I've resorted to three monitors plus the built in screen. Two monitors have fullscreen terminal emulators and the last has the browser. The built-in screen handles all the distracting stuff whenever I can be bothered to look down at it.With Xmonad I had 10 spaces on a single laptop screen (actually however many I wanted) with the flick of a button. And yes, I know about hacks like aerospace and the others that require disabling system integrity

sibeliuss: This was my secret weapon for years. My coworkers could never understand my focus and productivity and were always surprised when I said that it was due to working from a tiny laptop screen, and no more.

antisthenes: How do you view HTML/Code/JSONs in other applications?I have an instance of Postman open on my work laptop, and the useful area of the output constitutes maybe 20% of the screen.Do you just scroll around endlessly every 2 seconds? Or do you have amazing eyesight and use tiny fonts?

sibeliuss: Cmd+Tab skills! But mainly, its a matter of only ever doing one thing at a time and optimizing for that in lots of little ways.

daniel-ash: I love alt+tab way too much to ever go back to multi screen.A different angle: multiple screens can cause neck problems if you’re tilting your head in a weird direction for too long

kshacker: I gave up my monitor pre-covid, a few years earlier than that actually, and have not looked back.The only thing that does make me wonder at times is that my video in a zoom'ish app looks different than other people's video in some manner, but all that means is that maybe I need 1 backup and mirrored display for video calls, but maybe I can live with it.