Productivity Tool: Dual Monitors

Are two monitors really better than one? Someone asked me that recently - and the answer seems to be yes. (A single monitor that's very wide has the same benefits.)

I knew programmers liked the dual-monitor set-up, but I never quite understood how it could help a wide range of users until I read an article in the New York Times, where the author talks about two benefits. [Note: Registration may be required to read New York Times articles.]

1. Keeping your primary task in front of you, even when you go off to check e-mail or perform some other secondary task. As author Farhad Manjoo says:

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.

2. Making it easier to work with two applications at once. Again, quoting Manjoo:

As I’m writing this story in Word, I’m switching back to my text editor to search for pertinent data. When I find that information, I select it, copy it and switch back to Word to paste it. ... In a multimonitor setup, the brain rests easy: My notes now sit on one side of the dual screen while my Word document sits on the other. When I focus on one program, I don’t lose my place in the other.

In an earlier New York Times article, Ivan Berger provides more examples of how a dual-monitor set-up helped him, including this one:

When I work on tables or spreadsheets, I can see all the columns at once.

And there's research to back up the anecdotal evidence, too. As the New York Times points out:

Researchers at the University of Utah recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations. They found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text-editing operations than people using a single 18-inch monitor.

[Note: The other party in the study was NEC Display Solutions, which obviously would hope to see such results.]

Some research from Microsoft back in 2003 also showed significant increase in productivity from using a larger display area.

As one person said in a discussion of the University of Utah/NEC study:

I don't claim you can't do things almost as well with a single monitor. But once you've used a dual, you'll never go back.

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