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Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

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Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#131

Post by embedding-shape »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #89

I spent decades completely happy with Cmd+Tab. Now I’m helping someone develop a trading system and I need to see several log files simultaneously, a broker GUI, and neovim. Once I realized that in order to answer a single question I needed to Cmd+Tab at least four times, often more, I added two monitors and it’s dramatically lowered my stress level. FYI, on older MacBooks you can’t add more than one extra screen, bu…

Yeah, I've moved back and forward between multiple monitors and a single one, multiple times throughout my professional career, depending on what I'm doing. Game development usually makes me end up using at least two monitors, just programming frontend/backend usually works best with a single monitor (for whatever reason), producing music and video editor also works best with at least two monitors, but other creative things like writing works best with one, and so on.

At least personally, there is not a single setup that works for everything, I'm switching basically as often as I change what I work on.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#132

Post by embedding-shape »

nchmy wrote: post #121
kartoffelsaft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I tried a tiling window manager for about an hour and then stopped. It was absolute madness as the window size and positioning was seemingly random. I can't comprehend how anyone can use them

Used to use AwesomeWM for almost a decade before I forced myself to simplify to Gnome for other reasons, but I never felt like window sizing and positioning was random, it always opened in the logical place, which I kind of feel like is the whole value proposition of a window manager in the first place.

For curiosities sake, what window manager did you try?

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#133

Post by bluescrn »

petters wrote: post #112

> On a 34" ultrawide monitor, it was too easy to put YouTube running on the left side, and whatever else on the right. Yes, if you were doing that, almost any change to your environment that stops that will be good. I don't think you'd have to give up your monitor.

Yeah, you can't blame the monitor setup for distractions.

Up to a point, more screen real-estate is a universally good thing. Although beyond, say, two 24-27" screens or one great big one, you get into rapidly diminishing returns.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#134

Post by maleldil »

0xfaded wrote: post #47

The MacOS window manager is so bad that I've resorted to three monitors plus the built in screen. Two monitors have fullscreen terminal emulators and the last has the browser. The built-in screen handles all the distracting stuff whenever I can be bothered to look down at it. With Xmonad I had 10 spaces on a single laptop screen (actually however many I wanted) with the flick of a button. And yes, I know about hacks…

If you were using a maximised app per workspace, I recommend setting up Hammerspoon for quick app switching. I have hyper + J for terminal, hyper + K for browser and so on. No space switching, but since each app occupies the full screen, it doesn't matter.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#135

Post by znpy »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #89

I spent decades completely happy with Cmd+Tab. Now I’m helping someone develop a trading system and I need to see several log files simultaneously, a broker GUI, and neovim. Once I realized that in order to answer a single question I needed to Cmd+Tab at least four times, often more, I added two monitors and it’s dramatically lowered my stress level. FYI, on older MacBooks you can’t add more than one extra screen, bu…

I was about to post something very similar: the degree of benefit you get from having multiple displays depends a lot on the amount of multi-tasking that you have.

If you can focus most of your time on a single window then a single monitor is just fine.

But when you have to reason across multiple windows very very often then multiple displays help a lot.

For me it’s a bit messy: i am a cloud engineer and the kind of work i do varies multiple times a day. At some point I’m writing terraform code and all i need is my editor and a shell (sometimes my editor is in my shell) while ten minutes later i might be doing incident response and then i need a multitude of windows (shell, web browser showing logs, web browser showing metrics, web browser showing the aws console, web browser showing the meeting with other people handling the incident with me, shell, other stuff)…

So yeah, it really depends.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#136

Post by strangelove026 »

Something that's helped me lately is setup alfred commands where various apps are bound to a combination key press. It's on my split keyboard and I can't recall but it's a combination of keys, but, I think ctrl+cmd+option (all on the right hand thumb cluster) and a letter where the letter is bound to an app

- z launches conductor (coding agents with worktrees)

- w launches wezterm

- f launches firefox

- c launches chrome

- d launches obsidian

- s launches slack

So I'll keep one of these full screened on the main monitor at all times. And then I've got maybe spotify open on the laptop usually which I generally ignore most of the day.

And if I need two apps I'll use rectangle to tile windows side by side

It seems like a minor thing but it's a less cognitively burdensome workflow for me as the day goes on than cmd tab would be.

Also here's the link to conductor, I'm not affiliated but really like their tool imperfections and all https://www.conductor.build/

Also also, shimmering obsidian is great for alfred users. Can search notes in my vault with spotlight https://github.com/chrisgrieser/shimmering-obsidian

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#137

Post by znpy »

microtonal wrote: post #110
ActorNightly wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but if you get a DisplayLink dongle it works perfectly. LOL Im currently typing this on a work issued Macbook thats about 2 years old at this point, and 40% of the time, when I plug in a cable, it decides it wants to turn on and turn off hdmi output in rapid succession.

I always use DisplayPort over USB-C DP-Alt (or Thunderbolt on some displays) and I literally never have a problem across various LG, Dell and Apple Studio Displays. MacBook Pro M1 Pro or MacBook Pro M5 Sounds like something is really broken in your setup? On the other hand, sleeping/waking Thunderbolt displays on my ThinkPad with Linux regularly leads to kernel panics, across several kernel versions.

Recent thinkpads are a bit of shit-tier laptops, and linux doesn’t help much (it’s not linux’s fault).

for personal use I gave up after almost twenty years of thinkpad+linux and got a MacBook neo. So far it’s been great, much much better than my shit-tier ryzen-based x13g1 with 8c/16t and 32gb RAM. (Edit: it’s also more reliable when driving my 34” 1440p external display).

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#138

Post by LeoDaVibeci »

I have always avoided multiple monitor setups for this reason, however, I don't think the size of my monitor affects things as much as my usage of it.

Have you tried using a big monitor but just keeping windows as full-screen? I find this to be much less distracting. And of course, phone face down and notifications turned off.

Not my app, but I'll plug Dayflow here (YC backed). It's really great for measuring what you're working on, and they have local only mode for full privacy.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#140

Post by tuzemec »

I'm using two external 1440p displays at work and one 32" 4k at home (with a MBP). Mostly front-end development and music production at home.

Aerospace improved my productivity a lot on that front. My main apps/windows are now bound to an alt+key combination - I can easily switch without alt+tabbing like in the dark ages.

All my windows usually take up the full screen - I simply can't stand a window that doesn't fill the entire screen - not sure if that's some kind of OCD. The cognitive load of managing apps and spaces was quite high at the beginning, but now it's just muscle memory. I do recognize that it's not for everyone, but works very well for me.

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