Against the second monitor

I gave away my second monitor in the spring and I have been quietly insufferable about it ever since. This is the argument, offered without any claim that it generalises.

The pitch for two screens is that you can see more at once. That is true and it is exactly the problem. What I could see at once was my editor and everything that wanted my attention instead of my editor, arranged side by side, permanently, with no friction between them at all.

What actually changed

Switching to a single screen turned every context switch into a deliberate act. Not a large one — a keystroke — but a keystroke I notice, which turns out to be the entire mechanism. I do not think I focus better. I think I notice when I stop focusing, and noticing is most of the work.

The second thing is that I stopped arranging windows. I had not realised how much time went into the arrangement itself: the daily reconstruction of a layout, the dragging of a terminal to the right place, the small satisfaction of a tidy desktop that produced nothing.

The honest caveats

If you compare two documents for a living, ignore all of this. If you run a debugger against a live UI, ignore it twice. And I did keep the big screen — this is not an argument for a small workspace, only against a divided one.