by Serguey Shinder
Mine died on a Tuesday. Not dramatically, just a slow flicker and then nothing, and the replacement was three weeks out, and I was mildly irritated about it in the way you are about a small logistical problem that is going to make everything worse.
It did not make everything worse. That was the annoying part.
I had run two screens for most of my career and would have defended the setup articulately. The main one for the work, the second one for everything you need alongside the work. Documentation, logs, the terminal running the thing, the chat where someone might need me. It felt like extra room, and extra room feels unambiguously good.
What I noticed within about three days of having one screen was that the second monitor had not been holding reference material. It had been holding a stream. Whatever was on it changed on its own, and because it was in my peripheral vision, it changed in a way that reached me without my choosing to look. Every message, every log line, every rebuilt page. I was not reading it. I was being nudged by it, dozens of times an hour, at a level below the threshold where I would have called it an interruption.
With one screen, everything became an act. To see the chat I had to switch to the chat, which took a second and, more importantly, took a decision. And it turned out that a large fraction of the times I had been looking at that second screen, I would not have made the decision. I looked because it was already there.
The work itself changed shape too, and this surprised me more. With two screens I had kept a lot of things half open, in a state of being available, and that availability had a cost I had never counted. One screen forced me to close things. Closing things forced me to finish or abandon them. My desktop got worse and my days got clearer.
The replacement arrived and I set it up, because I had been looking forward to it for three weeks and it seemed absurd not to. Within a fortnight I was back to the old pattern, exactly, without ever deciding to be.
So now it is off more than it is on. It comes on when I have a genuine two-surface task, comparing two documents, watching output while editing input, and it goes off afterwards. Not as a rule I enforce, more as a default I reset to. The screen was never the problem. What it did was make one particular kind of attention free, and things that are free get used far past the point where they are helping.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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