No thank you. While I'm productive when mobile on my 14” 2.8K screen, I'm more productive with the extra headroom on my single 27” 4K at the office.
Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
21–30 of 185 posts
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#22reading the title I thought it's a relationship advice...
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#23I went the other direction. I bought a Dell 40" for productivity and I feel like the increased real estate only clutters and distracts.
That is very big. You would end up getting neck pain as you have to physically move your head to look at extremities of the screen. I use a 32" monitor and I find that I use only the center of the screen. I would downsize if not for vertical real estate.
I've had it two years, no neck pain. I don't have to move my head to look around.
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#24I 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 s…
> Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.
Tiling window managers are a good solution.
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#25This was my secret weapon for years. My coworkers could never understand my focus and productivity and were always surprised when I said that it was due to working from a tiny laptop screen, and no more.
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#26I've been a laptop purist most of my life, and prefer to work outside my house / office. Only recently I got a Big Monitor™ for a mini pc. It's really messed with my head. Now when I look at my 15" laptop everything looks incredibly small. Not just that, but the scroll direction is opposite on the pc, so if I'm working side by side I find myself accidentally scrolling each one backwards, or actually typing into the w…
[Unnatural Scroll Wheels](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...)
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#27This was my secret weapon for years. My coworkers could never understand my focus and productivity and were always surprised when I said that it was due to working from a tiny laptop screen, and no more.
How do you view HTML/Code/JSONs in other applications?
I have an instance of Postman open on my work laptop, and the useful area of the output constitutes maybe 20% of the screen.
Do you just scroll around endlessly every 2 seconds? Or do you have amazing eyesight and use tiny fonts?
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#28I 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 s…
> Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself. Tiling window managers are a good solution.
Tiling merely changes the idiosyncrasies, and I say this as someone who primarily uses them. (hyprland in my case)
If you created a window right now, where will it go? Which window will it take its space from? Does it use your focused window? Your mouse position? If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them? etc. That's all cognitive load when you aren't familiar and still requires some hand control when you are.
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#29I've used a cheap 50" TV as monitor for almost a decade now and I can't complain. Sight is 20/20 at 60yo, no eye strain, no headaches, nothing. I only use it for coding (sublime) and browsing (brave), so I don't care about resolution/retina/pixels/colors/curvature/etc.
Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
#30I've tried every set up that I have the privilage of having:
- 11in Macbook Air
- 16in Macbook Pro
- 1 X 27in monitor mounted with MB Pro in clamshell mode
- Linux Mint desktop on old Dell Inspiron with 4gb of RAM
and after using all of these to try and increase my productivity, I'm still an unfocused and possibly ADD riddled human. I'm not cut from the same cloth as my other productive peers who do not watch much YouTube and can type away at a black `vim` terminal on one half of their screen with software documentation on the other half of the screen.