Dual Monitors Revisited

In the pencil and paper world, how often do you find yourself referring to one book or document while working on another? Hand-copying a recipe from a book onto a piece of paper is one example. How would you arrange your materials? My guess is that you would lay the book and the paper side by side. Never in a million years would we consider placing one on top of the other and constantly swapping positions as we read from the book and copy to the paper. Why should things be different in our digital world?

How many times do you find yourself copying from document and pasting into another? How often do you work on one electronic document while referring to another? Are there times when you need to refer to two websites simultaneously? How to arrange your work in these cases?

If you are like most people, you wind up minimizing and maximizes one window, then the other. You may reduce the width of each window in an effort to view both on the same screen. What happens far to often is that we simply print the document we are referring to and lay it beside the monitor as we work on our other document. There's got to be a better way, and there is.

If placing our documents side-by-side works in the pencil/paper world, then its logical counterpart in the digital world is to place two monitors side-by-side.

After having read of the benefits offered by a dual-monitor arrangement, when I changed positions from the principalship to a central office position, the one thing I requested was a second monitor. I could not believe the productivity boost this arrangement offered. I found myself printing far fewer documents. I could work on a document while referring back and forth e-mails or my calendar or a website.

After retiring from the school system and setting up my home office, a new computer system featuring dual monitors was at the top of the list. After tasting what's it like to operate with two monitors, I would hate to work any other way.

If you want to make the move and need to know the next steps, here is an excellent article.

Increasing productivity with dual monitors

Microsoft has released an article regarding the benefits of multiple monitors. The story is located here.

My set-up at work includes two monitors. I have been using this configuration for a year and love it! Here is a post I wrote when I changed jobs/offices/computers and went to this arrangement.

Bob Rankin wrote a great article that provides the technical aspects for those those would like to pursue the idea further.

Two monitors

I have been seeing a great deal lately about the effects on productivity of having two monitors, so we are starting the new job with that setup. In this shot, I have Outlook on one monitor and my web browser on the other.

One example of how this setup is wonderful came Thursday. I was putting together a PowerPoint presentation which consisted of screenshots from the Internet. Normally, this task would have entailed maximizing the browser, hitting “Print Screen,” minimizing the browser, pasting the item in the PowerPoint, and then continuing that process until complete.

With two monitors, I simply open the browser on one and PowerPoint on the other. As I move the mouse, it travels from one screen to the other.

In the pencil/paper world, we often lay two pieces of paper side-by-side. Often, we are referring to one while we write on the other. At other times, we are comparing the two. We would never dream of putting one paper on top of the other and exchanging their tow positions countless times. However, that’s exactly what we have been doing with our computers for a couple of decades. With two monitors, my digital world has caught up with a good idea from our paper world.