Throughout my entire career, I’ve worked through two shows. But this week, for the first time ever, I switched back to just one screen — and it was pretty much the worst workweek of my life.
A little over a week ago, after more than 10 years of pretty much daily use, my LG W2361VV display showed its last picture before flickering and joining my iPod Classic and Xbox 360 on launch day in the gorgeous tech dump in the sky. Good night sweet prince, you have served me well.
Of course, I can’t complain about my screen being broken. At this point, he’s so old he could almost watch a PG-13 movie in theaters without parental supervision. But it left me scrambling for a replacement and facing the prospect of working from just a 15-inch laptop screen for an indefinite amount of time.
At first, I was strangely excited at the prospect. I was curious as to how my workflow would be affected and experiment with a more flexible setup. But the past seven days have been pretty much a disaster and (don’t tell my boss) among the least productive of my working life.
Fewer screens, more problems
Within less than an hour of working from just one monitor, I quickly realized how essential two monitors were to a steady workflow.
As the deals editor at Tom’s Guide, a big part of my job is researching retailers for the best sales on popular products, and this was made even more difficult when I couldn’t compare prices from many retailers at a single glance. Having to jump through Google Chrome tabs to view each deal individually made it even more difficult to get a complete overview of the best deals across retailers. Without a second screen, a task that would normally be straightforward suddenly becomes terribly time-consuming.
In fact, the compilation of my articles was also affected. When I’m writing, I’ll open Google Docs on my laptop screen with whatever reference points I need open on my screen. However, with a single screen if I wanted to quickly check a fact, or make sure I’d listed the correct price when selling for an item, it involved navigating through tabs which stalled the writing momentum I’d built.
Communicating with my colleagues was more of a chore, too. In my usual setup, I would leave our internal Slack open at all times in a corner of my screen. This ensures that I never miss a notification and am always aware of what’s going on across the TG towers. With Slack now only appearing when I chose to set it as the active tab, it felt strangely disconnected and was slower to respond to DMs.
Make adjustments
After a few hours of frustration, I realized there had to be a better way to work on a single screen. I decided to try splitting my screen in half and luckily we had an easy to follow How to guide that helped me through the process. But this idea was soon abandoned as I found each half too cramped to work effectively.
I turned to the Internet for advice and found a file Helpful blog post Embrace the value of working from a single screen. The author recommends Virtual Desktops for Windows, which is a great feature that allows you to have multiple, separate desktops at once. This prevents anyone from being burdened with dozens of different tabs and programs open at once.
Certainly, using virtual desktops has improved my productivity at least somewhat. My desktop was no longer flooded with half a dozen windows all open at once, but it still didn’t solve my core problem of having to look at several different tabs at the same time.
However, I discovered the advantage of working from one screen: flexibility. The other day, I had a maintenance person in my apartment fix a leaky sprinkler in my home office, and because I was working from just a laptop, I was able to work from another room without any fuss. It was sure to be able to work from anywhere without dragging the screen with me.
Find what works for you
If I’ve learned anything over the past week, it’s that it’s important to find the setup that works best for you. In my research, I found out school of thought He argues that having multiple screens at once is overstimulating and results in a loss of focus as you try to absorb too much information at once. While I can’t say this is an opinion I share, it’s an interesting hypothesis nonetheless.
I am also more convinced than ever that humans are highly adaptable creatures. The first few days I worked from my laptop screen were excruciating, but after just one week, I’m starting to develop habits centered around one screen, and my productivity is increasing at a remarkable rate.
However, I am still eagerly awaiting delivery of a replacement screen as I definitely prefer working from two screens. Maybe it’s just the nature of my work, or maybe it’s the way I work personally, but I’ll be sticking to a dual-monitor setup for the foreseeable future.
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