Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

I used to have 3 4K monitors. At some point this has become highly irritating messy. Now all my desktop PCs have single 32" 4K monitor and no scaling. This is "small" enough to keep my focus and yet large enough to arrange windows in a manner I like. Main being development IDE vertically on the right and the UI I debug / test vertically on the left be it browser or pure desktop app.

I will never give up my 5k2k LG 32 inch lcd. Single is best I do agree.

> Focus is essential for productivity. Do whatever it takes to get there.

I'm posting this because it's something I went through in my career and I hope it helps someone who is in a similar situation

I was undiagnosed ADHD until my 30s. In high school and university I was able to brute force my way through and get reasonably good grades. I had a really rocky start to my career in software. I was always getting middling performance reviews along the lines of "You're really good when you're working, but your productivity is terrible". Meanwhile my stress level was crazy high despite not exactly doing lots of overtime or anything else

Even treated, ADHD can make focus very difficult. Undiagnosed, it is devastating

Bringing it back to the words I quoted, I agree entirely. Focus is essential for productivity. Part of doing whatever it takes to get there might mean getting diagnosed and medicated

I just upgraded to a 49" curved display because it lets me view everything I need _for the current task_ at one time.

One virtual desktop is Messages, Slack, and Outlook for all my comms needs.

Another is IDE & browser for development work.

Another is todo list, planner, notes, and browser for task management.

Having to constantly swap app between browser, email, IDE, slack, etc is interruptive. Being able to switch to a single-focus desktop with everything visible is much more productive for me and reduces context switching.

I learned this lesson a couple decades ago.

Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.

However, I've also learned recently it depends what you're doing.

Software development, I just want one single maximized window on a single laptop monitor. If I have a near-retina DPI monitor with 120hz+ (I can't deal with low DPI fuzziness and low refresh all day) I'll usually have a 3-4 window layout on a single monitor with the IDE taking up half the screen.

There is a minor cognitive hit from switching focus between monitors for things like reading documentation, so I don't like doing that.

Music production? Man, I could probably use like 3+ monitors. Main stems view, a separate monitor for open VSTs, a separate monitor for video, a separate one for piano roll maybe. The window juggling gets really cumbersome on a single monitor.

My friend who is a professional musician (makes music for TV shows) uses 3 large TVs for music production.