Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

Sometimes things are so obvious to me I don't even think they'd be worthy of a discussion. But this is one of my blind spots, as I've come to realize over many years.

For development, I've always been happy with a 13" screen and nothing else. Not only that, but having all apps in full screen. It brings so much clarity to my mind. Exceptions (because f*ck dogma, right?) have been when I was in charge of monitoring some long-running process, in which case a secondary screen in vertical layout was very useful. Another one was for music making with Ableton Live: 2 screens was much more practical, independently of each individual screen size.

Just because of the setups I've just described, I've been looked at weird, or asked way too much questions. go figure.

> Do you not feel like there's a similar hit from switching full screen windows?

I feel like it should be, but in practice it isn't.

Sounds counter-intuitive, I know, but switching between windows on the same screen has near-zero context loss.

I also use a 3x3 grid of workspaces (center one is browser, all the others are dedicated to a single project/context/session/task each), and navigating workspaces (modifier+shift+arrows) also has near-zero contextual hit.

Even more counter-intuitively, while a second screen produces a large and irritating context-switch cost, using a little (physical, pen-and-paper) notepad next to me has even less context-switch loss than switching windows or workspaces do. It happens without me even realising it - sometimes I'd arise from a long session of coding and be surprised at some notes I made while coding.

There's probably something learnable about the human mind in all of this.

I usually use center 2/3 of 27'' screen with just a single top-level window for a similar reason. That puts it up to around 20.5'' and around 6:5 aspect ratio. I don't find having many windows shown at the same competing for my attention more productive. I don't benefit from having multiple code columns shown at once that much either and would rather switch among tabs or windows via shortcuts.

My productivity skyrocketed when I reduced my monitor count from 3 to 1.

I tried the big chonkers, but the humble 27" 1440p is unbeatable for me. I'm not being paid enough money to worry about that many pixels.

ALT-TAB is much faster than moving my head