Tech Blog

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For years I’ve been a huge proponent of having two (or more) monitors on your desk. They extra screen space can be invaluable to “getting things done”, or so conventional wisdom (and my own thinking) goes. Then I read an Ars Technica article about using an iPad for an entire workday and I wondered if a little focus might do well in my day. So I’m giving it a shot and I think I like it.

I had been thinking, as I would get distracted by HootSuite on my MacBook screen or fussing with getting my MacBook positioned to be able to have its screen in the right position, that maybe I was doing it all wrong. Yeah, yeah all the cool kids have their big primary monitor and laptop secondary or just have two huge screens hooked up to a desktop. However, I think our push to see everything at once might just be keeping us from seeing the big picture.

I haven’t delved into my RSS reader for a long while (with the exception of checking a few search-related feeds), have been using Zite and Summify to keep up (I don’t think I’ve missed anything huge).

I’m writing this post in Byword (my new favorite general-purpose writing tool—Scrivener still wins for big projects like books) and while I can see Chrome in the background and I know that HootSuite is still there—I’m focused on writing this post. I can see if there are emails waiting, but I also get a notification of the sender and subject when they come in (thank you Growl), so I know what’s important and what I can safely ignore.

Not that going from two displays to one isn’t without its frustrations. I’m used to moving Chrome to another display to have Byword and Chrome side-by-side for copying and pasting URLs. I’m also used to being able to have ancillary things of to the side that I can pull to my attention when I need them.

But today hasn’t been a productivity disaster.

I check HootSuite and Google+ when I naturally pause or need to change gears. I read email when there is something I need to read comes in and then I clear out the less important stuff.

So, a single display might be just right for me…at least for a while.