3 Reasons You Need 3 Monitors
Boosting your productivity isn’t easy. You come in with all the right intentions, but faced with the volume of calls, emails, Slack messages and the rest, it seems like it only gets harder to keep up.
The idea of multiple monitors isn’t new. In fact, at many workplaces, it’s now standard to have two. Anyone traveling for work feels the drop in productivity once they’re reduced to traveling with their laptop—back to one screen, and it’s back to minimizing and maximizing everything countless times a day. The chat icon blinks so many times in the day that it could make just about anyone scream.
While the relatively new standard of two monitors has become more common, could you use a third monitor? Could it make just as big a difference to add a third as it did when you switched to two?
We say “yes.” Keep reading to learn the three reasons why you need three monitors.
1. Chat isn’t going anywhere
Especially in the “new normal” this year and the huge surge of remote work we’ve seen, chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams have done wonders for team efficiency. Instead of getting lost in email chains, quick communications are easier to handle on these apps.
These same solutions have helped teams take two great steps forward, but also one step backward in terms of productivity. With the chat window requiring more screen real estate, a third screen could be the perfect home for your chat app so you can always keep it open and look at messages when you have time.
2. You’ll work faster
A study published a while back on Research Gate looked at the performance of employees on one monitor versus two, and workers with two monitors were 6% faster and had 33% fewer errors. Over time, the trend for speed became more pronounced because errors take time to correct—and now there were fewer errors.
The same is true when adding a third monitor. In fact, in recent preliminary studies, a third monitor has been shown to boost total productivity by as much as 35.5%.
3. You’ll feel better
Users in these same studies also stated that they preferred multiple monitors. A notable 28% said it was “easier to focus” with more monitors, and 24% said they also felt “more comfortable.” Many users even groaned when asked to use a single-monitor configuration.
Partitioning tasks and windows across three monitors will help you save brainpower, too, because you’ll minimize “window churn” (where you cycle through apps you’re using.) And if a fresh brain doesn’t feel good, we don’t know what does.
If you have loads of papers to work through, would you rather spread out on a big conference table or on an airline tray?
Yeah. No one likes airline trays.
The same logic is true for multiple monitors, and we’re advocates for three or four. Contact us if you want to learn more about how to make this the status quo at your organization.