Farhad Manjoo has had a personal epiphany. He wants to get more ‘done’ so he has turned off his second monitor, which allows him to be more focused.
Farhad Manjoo, Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One
The conventional argument in favor of dual monitors rests on what might be called the two-window problem. Imagine, for instance, the process of writing a research report. You have a word processor open in one window, and, somewhere else on the screen, a web browser full of tabs pointing to research papers. To write the report, you need to shift your attention frequently from the browser to the word processor and back again. On a small display, it would be difficult to keep both windows open at the same time, so you’d waste time switching from one to the other. On a large multiscreen display, you can keep both windows open on your screen — and you save all that switching time.
The research supports this. One study commissioned by NEC and conducted by researchers at the University of Utah showed that people using a dual-display machine to do a text-editing task were 44 percent more productive than those who used a single monitor.
But for most people, the time spent juggling two windows or scrolling across large documents isn’t the biggest bottleneck in getting work done. Instead, there’s a more basic, pernicious reason you feel constantly behind — you’re getting distracted.
Ms. Mark’s research, based on observations and digital tracking of office workers, has found that our workplaces are bombarded with distractions. Studies show that office workers are interrupted every four to 11 minutes by external distractions including phone calls, email and people who stop by your desk to chat about the weekend.
Then there are self-motivated distractions, when, for no apparent reason, you quit working on your project and do something else — for instance, jump into the rabbit hole of the web.
All such disruptions are costly. It can take workers as much as 25 minutes to regain focus after being interrupted. And constant interruptions create a stressful workplace.
“The second screen can also be an inviting entry-way for self-distraction,” Ms. Mark said. That’s because it’s an ever-present, available canvas calling out for you to fire up a web window and find solace in the latest thrills on YouTube.
This is an apparently unassailable argument, so long as you accept the premises and limit the discussion to a very narrow range of issues. The first narrowing premise is that our work consists principally of taking well-defined chunks of ‘work’ out of an implicit queue, performing the physical or mental labor necessary to get it ‘done’, and then moving onto the next item in the queue. Sometimes the work involves adding new elements to the queue, or the work involves interacting with others, which can lead to new items being added to the queue or existing items being modified, or deleted from the queue. And the implicit highest good is to execute the labor to accomplish these tasks as quickly as possible.
However, there is a wider range of issues involved, even if we don’t wander off into an aesthetic argument about how we are supposed to spend our time here on Earth. For example, it’s clear that at least some sorts of work require creative insights, and that these are not always accomplished through routine techniques.
There is also considerable evidence that when we are wrestling with decisions that involve many factors, simply concentrating on the problem analytically in the foreground of our thinking — focusing — does not necessarily lead to the best outcomes. I wrote about this in How to improve decision-making? Distraction. where I cited David Cresswell’s work:
New science shows that while we are distracted from making a final decision on some issue — even though we are unaware of it — the part of the brain associated with decision-making is still mulling the problem over, as David Cresswell of Carnegie Mellon discovered with his colleagues (see Being distracted — multitasking — can lead to better decisions).
Cresswell thinks this is because your brain can process more factors when your conscious self isn’t involved:
Your conscious mind has a capacity constraint–it can only think about a couple of features at once. But your unconscious mind doesn’t have these capacity constraints. It can weigh all relevant information more effectively.
This suggests that we have untapped reservoirs of greater parallelism in our thinking than generally recognized. And, just as importantly, this is a critical argument in favor of multitasking, whose detractors are too quick to attack its hypothetical decrease in productivity based on artificial cases of switching from math problems to recollection of words. However, the enemies of multitasking pay no attention to factors like the quality of decisions being made, or networked productivity.
The second point I made there — about networked productivity — represents another issue that Manjoo and others leave out of the picture of productivity. While I may be distracted by a coworker breaking in on my concentrating on a specific piece of work, and yes, in fact, it may take me 25 minutes to get back on track, it might well be that by answering a question that other person and a group of four others might have saved hours of effort by by timely recommendation, and that falls out of the equation of personal productivity.
There is an astonishing eagerness to overemphasize mechanistic and narrow-bore ideals of productivity, while leaving aside the more general and larger questions. Instead, we seem to see a lot of attention paid to how can we do more, rather than how can we do better.
