> I find switching applications with keyboard shortcuts and focusing on one thing at a time has improved my productivity. Using two or more monitors made it so

> I find switching applications with keyboard shortcuts and focusing on one thing at a time has improved my productivity. Using two or more monitors made it so easy for me to get distracted. I very much agree with this - alt-tabbing between browser, terminal and fullscreened Emacs are what I've been doing for years. But very recently I decided to make two significant changes: 1. Adding a second monitor for documentation or visualizing output. When I'm going through longer written works (tutorials on languages, toolkits, etc), it's rotated to portrait mode and I find it more conducive to typing and testing things on the first monitor (with Emacs still fullscreen, but C-x 2 for splitting it in half). Recently I've been playing with OpenSCAD and I've liked having the second monitor in landscape mode; then I edit files in Emacs, and OpenSCAD updates the render as soon as I save the file. Transcribing music from scans displayed on a portrait monitor into MuseScore in fullscreen on a landscape monitor is a third "topic" I find two monitors handy for. Lastly is IT/sysadmin where I have a 160x60 terminal with a tab per server on the landscape monitor, and dashboards or documentation on the second monitor rotated to landscape mode. Control PgUp and PgDown between server consoles, each running screen, where screen zero is colorized log output. 2. The second change might have a a bigger impact than the first: multiple virtual desktops, one for each "topic." For example, my virtual desktops are currently entitled "Main", "IT", "3D Modelling", "Programming", and "Music". Of course I switch between them with a keyboard shortcut. This really seems to help my focus, by putting things "out of reach" so that I can't just Alt-tab to Reddit or HN when I'm bored or stuck. The key with any tool is to figure out how to make it work for you, not against you. Sounds like you've already made progress on this front, but I thought I'd provide my two cents.