7 ms·

Dozens of Excel spreadsheets all across the room. Jira boards to the left, performance dashboards to the right, Gantt diagrams all over the ceiling. That’s wha

by pjerem 3y ago

Dozens of Excel spreadsheets all across the room. Jira boards to the left, performance dashboards to the right, Gantt diagrams all over the ceiling. That’s what some people are dreaming at night.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Will that really make you more productive? Or do you just imagine it would?
- brokencode 3y ago
  Have you ever tried using more than one monitor? It helps productivity. And have you ever upgraded your monitor to a larger one so you could fit more on the screen at once? That helps productivity too. Imagine being able to make as many monitors and in as many sizes as you want. And imagine being able to take them with you as a replacement for your laptop monitor.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Have you ever tried using more than one monitor? It helps productivity. I have and I haven't been delivering code/tasks 50% faster when my monitor count increased by 50% from 2 to 3. Then went back to one monitor with virtual workspaces as that made me more productive than having to constantly move my neck eyes across a sprawl of windows. Plus having to manage windows around and tile them "just right" across several monitors always interrupted my flow, and worse, was costing me even more time when those windows were moving around and they weren't in the place where I remember I left them last time. >Imagine [...] But I'm not asking what you imagine it might do. I'm asking if it actually measurably improves your productivity, not if you imagine it could, because those are two very different things. I also imagined that having as many monitors as an operator from The Matrix would make me more productive but it hasn't. My coding and task delivery speed has stayed the same or even gone down inversely proportional to the number of monitors.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      1 to ultrawide or 1 to 2 is a huge jump, because you can keep two full windows open at a time and not need to task switch. Think documentation and code, code and running example, etc. 2 to 3 is a bit of a jump because now you can keep slack or teams or email on the third monitor (rotating is great for this). But my other two monitors after that really don't give me that much more.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >1 to ultrawide or 1 to 2 is a huge jump, because you can keep two full windows open at a time and not need to task switch. Depends, for some people switching windows/workspaces is less intrusive than moving their head to the sides all the time. Personally I had all kinds of multi monitor setups and the best one for my neck and eyes is a single one that fits in the center of my field of view. Even when I have more monitors, I usually end up using one in the center 90% of the time and the second one on the side is mostly a waste.
      - bpye 3y ago
        > 2 to 3 is a bit of a jump because now you can keep slack or teams or email on the third monitor (rotating is great for this). In my personal experience, having Teams or Outlook visible whilst I'm trying to work is a negative impact on my productivity. Most messages/emails do not require my immediate attention, having them open is an unhelpful distraction.
    - matthew-wegner 3y ago
      For some people, it's just more comfortable. I'm probably just as productive on a trip with my 16" MBP, but I still feel some sort of relief when I sit back down on my multi-monitor setup at home. "I like it more" is a good-enough reason to do it! Consider another example--I sleep alone on a king-size bed. If I swapped it for a queen bed, I bet it wouldn't even show up in any sort "measurably improved" metric: Time to fall asleep, total time slept, time to wake up, maybe trying to measure physical fitness numbers, etc. But I still prefer the king bed. Maybe some people wouldn't care, and would rather save the space/money, and that's totally fine too.
  - k12sosse 3y ago
    There has to be terminology about the breaking even point where the time you spend looking for which monitor/window/tab that thing you were just looking at went to. Sort of like multitasking diminished returns.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Sometimes I think beating that should be a research project or startup. I am frustrated with all the GUI SQL clients like pgadmin4, DBeaver, etc. There are so many things brain damaged about those things, for instance the way they are always harassing you to every precious SQL query you wrote but aren't really oriented to saving your files together with your code in version control with discipline as well as having scratch files that don't punish you for using scratch files. The worst problem is that the harder queries involve looking at several tables at once so I really want something that lets me look at all the table definitions that are relevant to a query I am writing at once and that does the same thing at the instance level as well as the schema level, that is, if I am looking at a particular record I want to see the graph of related records around it following key relationships, whether those are coded in the schema or not.
  - d-lisp 3y ago
    Having more monitors doesn't make me more productive, it makes me lazier. If I have the possibility to show a lot of lines of code, then I don't feel the necessity of caring a lot about the way my source is structured, the way my code is written and the way elements of the source are grouped. Sometimes when I code on a 13" screen, I feel like I am more naturally inclined to write better, easily maintainable code (all subjectivity apart, I am pretty sure that better code exists objectively, not just in our cyber-tales; not just in clean code articles). I feel like less screen implies more brain, and that more brain means the source is second nature; and because you have to compensate the lack of vision with internalization, you can projectile-find-file eyes closed and never break out of focus like when you do when you have four screen, nerdtree, lsp-symbols floating around, multiple ide panes open and having to touch your mouse just for the sake of clicking all around your squared kilometer of screen space. That's of course an exaggeration; still I feel well more productive with small screen space exactly like I felt when I traded my mouse for a generalized vim and spacemacs-like keymap : awkward at first but cheap and effective in the end.
    - leptons 3y ago
      Sure, I can do work with only one screen, but it absolutely takes longer and is more grinding than having enough screen real estate to have the important stuff up front and center at all times. > Sometimes when I code on a 13" screen, I feel like I am more naturally inclined to write better, easily maintainable code I'm not sure what to call this - an unnecessary superstition? Self flagellation? I've never needed a constraint like this to write better, easily maintainable code. YMMV, I guess? I'll set up as many monitors as I can fit on my desk. I've had up to 9 before which was equivalent to approximately an 83" curved screen. Currently I have three 32" 4k monitors in portrait which are equivalent to one big 55" 6k screen (6480 x 3840). It does help with my productivity, a lot. Having only one screen means switching between many windows constantly, it's inefficient and a real pain when I need 8 or more windows open for different things - front end code, back end code, front end debug window, back end debug window, several different browser applications for testing, dozens of Google results and API document pages, terminal(s), and more. Nothing beats having all the important stuff visible at the same time. I have a laptop. It has 2 screens. I'd add a third screen but it would get in the way of the TV when I'm on the couch in the evenings.
  - audunw 3y ago
    We had an excess of monitors at work at one point.. so I don't have to imagine. I made a challenge of setting up as many as my computer could handle. Ended up with 5 monitors. I found I could only use two actively (I guess that would be one now that I have an ultrawide), and a third passively (music player, maybe CI status). I have to agree to the sentiment many here have: a big monitor is nice, but other than that there's much more to gain by being efficient at using virtual desktops (can recommend virtual desktop autohotkey script)
    - Retric 3y ago
      I think there’s something to the virtual screens beyond just a larger active workspace. One of my favorite setups had a small dedicated screen for email and IM. Being able to look away and have all my existing work in the same place was mentally easier to deal with than swapping one of the screens briefly. Might have something to do with the doorway effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect
    - Fnoord 3y ago
      I find several virtual desktop autohotkey scripts. Which one do you recomnend? Can you achieve same with PowerToys?
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    Have you met i3?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > And have you ever upgraded your monitor to a larger one so you could fit more on the screen at once? That helps productivity too. It doesn't help productivity for everyone. At least, it doesn't for me, anyway.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  For somebody who's legitimately doing complicated business management stuff and already has two monitors covered in documents all the time, of course it would. I don't do that myself, but I've worked at multiple companies with people whose job includes trying to synthesize all that stuff together into useful business decisions.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    > trying to synthesize all that stuff together into useful business decisions. I thought in 2024 you could just ask an AI and still go to Ibiza.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  Productivity as theatre is big business for productivity gurus. There’s entire YouTube channels and subreddits where folks compete with one another to be as “optimised” as possible.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    My point exactly. I can say that having something nice and expensive makes me "feel more productive", but if the party paying me for my effort and for my expensive gear would ask to see any measurable proof of that improvement to see what the ROI of that purchase was, then I'd be lost for words and blabber on how "in knowledge work you can't actually measure productivity", but then that party could say "well if you can't measure productivity how can you justify us buying it for you?" Then the argument becomes that maybe I'm actually not in any measurable way more productive in practice, but I feel better doing the work there, while having that fancy gear that I want and like. Which I guess is why many tech companies spoil their workers with all kinds of perks even if they know those perks won't make workers more productive but it convinces them to work and stay there instand of working somewhere else where they get the needless things they want but don't need. Reminds me of that article on HN where the CEO/CFO of a small start-up asked to see the arguments of what improvements and ROI would bring if they all upgraded their M1 and M2 Macs to M3s as some of their employees wanted. And there's a good point to this. It's not being stingy, it's just taking a second to think if you're spending your money where the ROI is, or are you being wasteful always buying the new shiny every year even if you don't need it just to keep some spoiled man children happy or to advertise it on the job ads that your company's so loaded with cash it can afford to give everyone the latest shiny, when I'd rather have more vacation days. My parents used to do the same to young me when I wanted a new PC or upgrade parts. They expected an argumentation of the ROI or academic performance improvements those purchases would bring beyond "my games will run better" lol. You can prove to your boss or bean counter that having faster CPUs will reduce compile times and deliver results faster, but you can't really prove having even more monitors or AVPs, will also achieve similar workforce productivity increases across the board.
- loudandskittish 3y ago
  To me, all this feels like recreating "Hollywood UIs" that were designed for the benefit of the audience watching and not an actual user.
- pjerem 3y ago
  I was just joking
- Tagbert 3y ago
  As a project manager, I need to keep on top of and coordinate activity in several channels in one session. The things I review are in Slack, Outlook, Jira, Confluence, and Testrail as well as local files in Excel, Word, and BBedit all with a dash of Zoom. I also need to be able to analyze and summarize that material into various reports. then multiply that by the 4 projects that I’m managing currently. I currently use a large monitor and my laptop monitor with lots of windows and browser plugins to swap groups of tabs in and out. I like the idea of having windows arrayed around me to let me keep more in view. It would be really helpful if there were a way in AVP to swap the equivalent of desktops. i suppose that might be to have windows in different rooms of the house but that seems inefficient for working.
NikkiA 3y ago
I had a quick future glimpse of spreadsheets evolving to VR 'conspiracy boards' with red string between cells; just for a second, while reading your comment. It's probably the future, and I'll probably hate it.

by pjerem 3y ago

Dozens of Excel spreadsheets all across the room. Jira boards to the left, performance dashboards to the right, Gantt diagrams all over the ceiling. That’s what some people are dreaming at night.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

Will that really make you more productive? Or do you just imagine it would?

brokencode 3y ago
Have you ever tried using more than one monitor? It helps productivity. And have you ever upgraded your monitor to a larger one so you could fit more on the screen at once? That helps productivity too. Imagine being able to make as many monitors and in as many sizes as you want. And imagine being able to take them with you as a replacement for your laptop monitor.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Have you ever tried using more than one monitor? It helps productivity. I have and I haven't been delivering code/tasks 50% faster when my monitor count increased by 50% from 2 to 3. Then went back to one monitor with virtual workspaces as that made me more productive than having to constantly move my neck eyes across a sprawl of windows. Plus having to manage windows around and tile them "just right" across several monitors always interrupted my flow, and worse, was costing me even more time when those windows were moving around and they weren't in the place where I remember I left them last time. >Imagine [...] But I'm not asking what you imagine it might do. I'm asking if it actually measurably improves your productivity, not if you imagine it could, because those are two very different things. I also imagined that having as many monitors as an operator from The Matrix would make me more productive but it hasn't. My coding and task delivery speed has stayed the same or even gone down inversely proportional to the number of monitors.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    1 to ultrawide or 1 to 2 is a huge jump, because you can keep two full windows open at a time and not need to task switch. Think documentation and code, code and running example, etc. 2 to 3 is a bit of a jump because now you can keep slack or teams or email on the third monitor (rotating is great for this). But my other two monitors after that really don't give me that much more.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >1 to ultrawide or 1 to 2 is a huge jump, because you can keep two full windows open at a time and not need to task switch. Depends, for some people switching windows/workspaces is less intrusive than moving their head to the sides all the time. Personally I had all kinds of multi monitor setups and the best one for my neck and eyes is a single one that fits in the center of my field of view. Even when I have more monitors, I usually end up using one in the center 90% of the time and the second one on the side is mostly a waste.
    - bpye 3y ago
      > 2 to 3 is a bit of a jump because now you can keep slack or teams or email on the third monitor (rotating is great for this). In my personal experience, having Teams or Outlook visible whilst I'm trying to work is a negative impact on my productivity. Most messages/emails do not require my immediate attention, having them open is an unhelpful distraction.
  - matthew-wegner 3y ago
    For some people, it's just more comfortable. I'm probably just as productive on a trip with my 16" MBP, but I still feel some sort of relief when I sit back down on my multi-monitor setup at home. "I like it more" is a good-enough reason to do it! Consider another example--I sleep alone on a king-size bed. If I swapped it for a queen bed, I bet it wouldn't even show up in any sort "measurably improved" metric: Time to fall asleep, total time slept, time to wake up, maybe trying to measure physical fitness numbers, etc. But I still prefer the king bed. Maybe some people wouldn't care, and would rather save the space/money, and that's totally fine too.
- k12sosse 3y ago
  There has to be terminology about the breaking even point where the time you spend looking for which monitor/window/tab that thing you were just looking at went to. Sort of like multitasking diminished returns.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Sometimes I think beating that should be a research project or startup. I am frustrated with all the GUI SQL clients like pgadmin4, DBeaver, etc. There are so many things brain damaged about those things, for instance the way they are always harassing you to every precious SQL query you wrote but aren't really oriented to saving your files together with your code in version control with discipline as well as having scratch files that don't punish you for using scratch files. The worst problem is that the harder queries involve looking at several tables at once so I really want something that lets me look at all the table definitions that are relevant to a query I am writing at once and that does the same thing at the instance level as well as the schema level, that is, if I am looking at a particular record I want to see the graph of related records around it following key relationships, whether those are coded in the schema or not.
- d-lisp 3y ago
  Having more monitors doesn't make me more productive, it makes me lazier. If I have the possibility to show a lot of lines of code, then I don't feel the necessity of caring a lot about the way my source is structured, the way my code is written and the way elements of the source are grouped. Sometimes when I code on a 13" screen, I feel like I am more naturally inclined to write better, easily maintainable code (all subjectivity apart, I am pretty sure that better code exists objectively, not just in our cyber-tales; not just in clean code articles). I feel like less screen implies more brain, and that more brain means the source is second nature; and because you have to compensate the lack of vision with internalization, you can projectile-find-file eyes closed and never break out of focus like when you do when you have four screen, nerdtree, lsp-symbols floating around, multiple ide panes open and having to touch your mouse just for the sake of clicking all around your squared kilometer of screen space. That's of course an exaggeration; still I feel well more productive with small screen space exactly like I felt when I traded my mouse for a generalized vim and spacemacs-like keymap : awkward at first but cheap and effective in the end.
  - leptons 3y ago
    Sure, I can do work with only one screen, but it absolutely takes longer and is more grinding than having enough screen real estate to have the important stuff up front and center at all times. > Sometimes when I code on a 13" screen, I feel like I am more naturally inclined to write better, easily maintainable code I'm not sure what to call this - an unnecessary superstition? Self flagellation? I've never needed a constraint like this to write better, easily maintainable code. YMMV, I guess? I'll set up as many monitors as I can fit on my desk. I've had up to 9 before which was equivalent to approximately an 83" curved screen. Currently I have three 32" 4k monitors in portrait which are equivalent to one big 55" 6k screen (6480 x 3840). It does help with my productivity, a lot. Having only one screen means switching between many windows constantly, it's inefficient and a real pain when I need 8 or more windows open for different things - front end code, back end code, front end debug window, back end debug window, several different browser applications for testing, dozens of Google results and API document pages, terminal(s), and more. Nothing beats having all the important stuff visible at the same time. I have a laptop. It has 2 screens. I'd add a third screen but it would get in the way of the TV when I'm on the couch in the evenings.
- audunw 3y ago
  We had an excess of monitors at work at one point.. so I don't have to imagine. I made a challenge of setting up as many as my computer could handle. Ended up with 5 monitors. I found I could only use two actively (I guess that would be one now that I have an ultrawide), and a third passively (music player, maybe CI status). I have to agree to the sentiment many here have: a big monitor is nice, but other than that there's much more to gain by being efficient at using virtual desktops (can recommend virtual desktop autohotkey script)
  - Retric 3y ago
    I think there’s something to the virtual screens beyond just a larger active workspace. One of my favorite setups had a small dedicated screen for email and IM. Being able to look away and have all my existing work in the same place was mentally easier to deal with than swapping one of the screens briefly. Might have something to do with the doorway effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    I find several virtual desktop autohotkey scripts. Which one do you recomnend? Can you achieve same with PowerToys?
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  Have you met i3?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > And have you ever upgraded your monitor to a larger one so you could fit more on the screen at once? That helps productivity too. It doesn't help productivity for everyone. At least, it doesn't for me, anyway.
crooked-v 3y ago
For somebody who's legitimately doing complicated business management stuff and already has two monitors covered in documents all the time, of course it would. I don't do that myself, but I've worked at multiple companies with people whose job includes trying to synthesize all that stuff together into useful business decisions.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > trying to synthesize all that stuff together into useful business decisions. I thought in 2024 you could just ask an AI and still go to Ibiza.
iamacyborg 3y ago
Productivity as theatre is big business for productivity gurus. There’s entire YouTube channels and subreddits where folks compete with one another to be as “optimised” as possible.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  My point exactly. I can say that having something nice and expensive makes me "feel more productive", but if the party paying me for my effort and for my expensive gear would ask to see any measurable proof of that improvement to see what the ROI of that purchase was, then I'd be lost for words and blabber on how "in knowledge work you can't actually measure productivity", but then that party could say "well if you can't measure productivity how can you justify us buying it for you?" Then the argument becomes that maybe I'm actually not in any measurable way more productive in practice, but I feel better doing the work there, while having that fancy gear that I want and like. Which I guess is why many tech companies spoil their workers with all kinds of perks even if they know those perks won't make workers more productive but it convinces them to work and stay there instand of working somewhere else where they get the needless things they want but don't need. Reminds me of that article on HN where the CEO/CFO of a small start-up asked to see the arguments of what improvements and ROI would bring if they all upgraded their M1 and M2 Macs to M3s as some of their employees wanted. And there's a good point to this. It's not being stingy, it's just taking a second to think if you're spending your money where the ROI is, or are you being wasteful always buying the new shiny every year even if you don't need it just to keep some spoiled man children happy or to advertise it on the job ads that your company's so loaded with cash it can afford to give everyone the latest shiny, when I'd rather have more vacation days. My parents used to do the same to young me when I wanted a new PC or upgrade parts. They expected an argumentation of the ROI or academic performance improvements those purchases would bring beyond "my games will run better" lol. You can prove to your boss or bean counter that having faster CPUs will reduce compile times and deliver results faster, but you can't really prove having even more monitors or AVPs, will also achieve similar workforce productivity increases across the board.
loudandskittish 3y ago
To me, all this feels like recreating "Hollywood UIs" that were designed for the benefit of the audience watching and not an actual user.
pjerem 3y ago
I was just joking
Tagbert 3y ago
As a project manager, I need to keep on top of and coordinate activity in several channels in one session. The things I review are in Slack, Outlook, Jira, Confluence, and Testrail as well as local files in Excel, Word, and BBedit all with a dash of Zoom. I also need to be able to analyze and summarize that material into various reports. then multiply that by the 4 projects that I’m managing currently. I currently use a large monitor and my laptop monitor with lots of windows and browser plugins to swap groups of tabs in and out. I like the idea of having windows arrayed around me to let me keep more in view. It would be really helpful if there were a way in AVP to swap the equivalent of desktops. i suppose that might be to have windows in different rooms of the house but that seems inefficient for working.

NikkiA 3y ago

I had a quick future glimpse of spreadsheets evolving to VR 'conspiracy boards' with red string between cells; just for a second, while reading your comment. It's probably the future, and I'll probably hate it.