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Comment by dschuetz | Hacker News Reader

"Multi-Screen" is too broad a term. I have caught myself sometimes drifting in thoughts because there was something else going on other than work. Having two different agendas and juggling them using two or three different work environments is the attention killer for me.

As consequence I have bought a KVM switch and hooked it up to my main screen. Anything else not related to the current agenda gets shut off, or muted, or plainly ignored no matter what happens there. Works so far for me.

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This is exactly why I've gone back to using just one (admittedly, big ass 32") screen whereas before I had three (one was attached to a separate device where builds occured). I do have one other display, but it's stacked high enough up on my vesa pole above %PRIMARY_DISPLAY% so I have to tilt my head up quite a bit to look at it. Note taking app, a small monitoring dashboard, email, and a music player are up there.

This means if it's not on my main screen, it's not on my mind until I make the conscious decision to move something over to it, or I need to drag something off of it. It's a behavior I had to force myself to train and become disciplined at.

If it needs to come down to the main screen, it should under no circumstances STAY there if I'm not working on it.

Benefits: attention is more intentional and deliberate, I can quickly glance up at something if needed, but I'm not straining my neck looking up because it's happening so infrequently.

Intentionality is king.

(edit: the only real problem with this particular bit of home office design is my macbook stays shut in a vertical dock, and since I haven't really made myself buy an external webcam, there are times I have to unhook things just to bring the Macbook out because there are people who are weirdly hung up about being able to 'see everyone's faces' on Zoom calls just to conduct an outage post mortem, which is annoying--but not annoying enough that it's made me want to spend even $20 on an external webcam)

This headline is clickbaity, esp for a HN audience. The article clearly states that the problem is consuming multiple media sources simultaneously, which AFAIK is more or less _completely_ unrelated to having more than one screen.

Having more than one screen is something you need _when the one thing you are working on requires too much relevant information for a single screen_. That's the opposite.

The word "screen" here is a poor choice. You could just as easily be "multi-screening" by watching a picture in picture video while reading a web-site. Or the reverse, in their frame of reference, web development where you have one display/ output screen and one code screen is not multi-screening.

Poor word choice because it's not as catchy as saying "Trying to consume two types of media at once" which is what they seem to be pointing to.

Exactly. I clicked through because I thought; "oh, shit. I cannot even get work done without two. Sometimes I use three!". I've been had!

I've heard some anecdotes that multiple monitors do reduce focus though[0]. I'm still on the fence though, the alternative to multiple monitors is often lots of workspaces, and switching between those can often feel just as jarring as looking to my left or right. Using i3, I often forget which workspace I left something on and spend 2 or 3 seconds cycling through every open workspace.

[0]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-05-23-desk-setup/

I think it depends on the task. If I'm writing something I only have cursory familiarity with (which is very often) It's kind of indispensable to have another screen, because to rapidly implement code, test if I actually got it right, and refer to both the output and the docs i need at least:

1. Browser (sometimes two, one for docs the other for stack overflow / googlin') 2. Execution shell 3. Editor (also frequently doubled - if there are imports or more than one file involved) 4. (occasionally) utility shell - for traversing the project directory and assessing changes

...having these split up by workspace just feels super clunky. Having them 10deg of eye rotation away is way better.

Personally I'm very fond of three screens, it lets me split information by level of attention required: the center one is for what I'm focused on, left screen is additional information I might need (like documentation or console output), right screen for things I don't really need to pay attention to (given my peripheral vision isn't as strong on the right).

The positions are set in such a way that I can glance at the left without turning my head, whereas the right side requires me to switch focus / turn my head to give it my full attention.

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