sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, May 18 - May 24, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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If using multiple screens at work made you more productive, care to give an example or two what do you put on one and the other and how they interact? Perhaps also negatives, in what situations that doesn't help?
Hypothesis: they only work with transformation type work e.g. translation where you read a document in one and translate in another, or read a spec in one and write code to implement it in another or at any rate the output you generate is strongly dependent on an input that you need to keep referring to.
I actually borrowed a TV as a second screen because I need to re-create the layouts of document reports from an old accounting software in a new. So it is handy to have the example on the TV while I work on the new one. Of course a printout on a music-stand would work just as well...
I don't know how common this is, but with a dual-monitor setup I tend to have one in landscape and one in portrait. The portrait monitor is good for things like documents, or other "long" windows like log files and barfy terminal output. The landscape monitor is good for everything that's designed to operate in that aspect ratio (like web stuff).
More generally, there's usually something I'm reading and something I'm working on, and I'll read from one monitor, while working on whatever is in the other.
At work I make use of four Gnome workspaces: one which has distracting things like email and project management gubbins; one active work-dev workspace; one self-development-dev workspace; and one where I stick all the applications and terminals that I don't actively need to look at, but won't run minimised/headlessly for one reason or another.