4 ms·
Meh. What this article really means is "If you get distracted by things, keeping distractions up on more screens will make you more distracted." I have my lap
by cthalupa 12y ago
Meh.
What this article really means is "If you get distracted by things, keeping distractions up on more screens will make you more distracted."
I have my laptop screen and 3 extra monitors:
1) Email. I keep my main inbox very filtered - email that shows up there is important and I need to see it and read it asap
2) IRC/OCS. Work communication primarily happens through these, and much of it is important.
3) Browser open to our internal workflow tools / tabs for research
4) Laptop screen, closest to me out of all of these, where I have terminals open, etc.
I originally only had one extra display outside of the monitor, but my productivity /very/ measurably went up when I added more displays. No more hunting to find the window I wanted. Easy to reference things when talking to people. Easy to reference things when working on a server. etc etc etc.
So, like just about every tool out there, the usefulness is determined by the use case that prompted it, and how effectively you use it.
- enobrev 12y agoHow are you using the three external monitors from a laptop? The reason I stick with a desktop is because I very heavily rely upon three monitors and haven't found any decent solutions to do so with a laptop. I'm using ubuntu, so I understand if the OS is a limitation, but I'd still love to hear about what you're using to make it work.
- honopu 12y agoI'm not who you asked, but I have: 2012 Retina macbook pro 15" 27" display port dell 24" display port dell 27" Samsung on hdmi to dvi cable. It will run all 4 screens at once.
- enobrev 12y agoInteresting. I have a 2013 MBP from work and my monitors have HDMI and I seem to recall HDMI / DP converters. I'll need to check if the display ports work well with ubuntu. Thanks! (two 27s and a 24! Fantastic!)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- thisGuysAccount 12y agoYou can get external USB monitors. I've used three displays on a laptop - DVI, laptop display, USB display
- auganov 12y agoSame, I might just add that the USB monitor thing (well, DisplayLink at least) is not as bad as one would expect. It's surprisingly efficient and 99.9% of the time you won't notice the difference. When playing full screen video it might take up a bit of CPU power, but unless you're under heavy load already it won't matter. Been using a StarTech DisplayLink adapter for 2 years now and never complained. EDIT: A quick google reveals it might not behave as well on a linux-based OS.
- Flenser 12y agoIf you get easily distracted, make what you want to be working on distract you away from unproductive things. E.g. I've made an autohotkey script to bring my IDE to the front when I've finished a build, and command line aliases to trigger desktop notifications when long running operations finish.