Dual monitors.sure. five monitors..can you keep track

With all of the people working from home with the Covid-19 restrictions, I see the topic of multiple monitors come up quite often on Facebook discussions. If you are not a fan of having more than one monitor you need to listen to the following video. This is an excellent video on time management. If you want to skip to the dual monitor stuff it starts at 27:15

The question is how many monitors are too much? How much information can your brain focus on at any given time?  Studies have shown we are more focused on tasks if that is the only thing in front of us.  We make fewer mistakes if we are focusing on one, maybe two tasks. Having too much information can lead to lack of focus.

 

 

Just some food for thought.

The following is my monitor setup. I used to have four monitors. A year ago I bought a 32″ high-resolution monitor to replace two of my monitors.  You see a third in this photo.  I added this about three months ago because I found myself listening to YouTube videos and other media. Having a dedicated screen for this freed up much of my moving of windows. this screen also has a Roku box and a retorpi emulator for those times I need a break but can’t step away.

I like this setup for a couple of reasons. The first is it allows me to have what I am working on front and center.  Depending on what I am working on it may be on the laptop screen or the bigger screen.  Viso and programs with toolbars typically go on the large screen. e-mail, slack, and other things go on the other screen.  Most of my network monitoring tools either get dumped into a Slack channel or e-mail.  I have turned off any ding notifications. These are interruptions.

Where would more monitors be helpful?  If I wanted to have a dedicated monitor for some sort of monitoring tools such as Librenms dashboard, The Dude, or something similar.   As my career progresses I am investing more in redundancy and focused monitoring rather than watching ever little part of the network.  I schedule review time for this stuff. More on this in a later post.

 

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