A few months ago I was reading an article, initially published by Jason Calacanis and later translated into Spanish by Alec Oxenford, about money savings by implementing quick and simple tips as part of a start-up. One of the most discussed points was the usage of multiple monitors to increase the developers performance.

Today, I found Stefan Didak home office photo on Flikr .

Multiples Monitores

This finally raised my curiosity on how a developer performance can be boost by using more than one monitor.

After a quick research looking for statistical data and performance increase facts, i found no more than a few personal experiences posted by people that tested multiple monitors and papers published by monitor and video card manufacturers.

ANew York Times Artivle states that the productivity increases between 20% and 30%. The experience comes from writers who can work on their articles while seeing the outline or draft on the second monitor; designers who can edit images in one monitor and having a previous version (or the original) in the second monitor for their reference. Some few are from Web-shoppers who can do their orders in an easier way.

Obviously all this activities can also be done using a single monitor; the clue here is the increase in the velocity used to do each activity. The time taken in looking for the window in the task bar and activating it (and back) is significantly higher than the one taken to look at the other monitor instead. Yes, the experts use Alt-Tab; but the issue here appears when trying to reach back to the original window, there are two alternatives 1) get back using Alt-Shift-Tab or 2) keep pressing Alt-Tab several times until reaching up the original window. This is really a time waste.

Additionally, I found an article published in Computerworld; it also talks about using multiple monitors, but it states that in several cases, employees preffer a single monitor in order to have more free space in their desks.

In my personal experience, i work with a 14″ wide-screen notebook. During some time I had the opportunity to have a second monitor in the office, a 17″ one, and the comfort it gave me was really higher. It let me work on the project documents and spreadsheets while reading e-mails in the second monitor and using MS project, which is not designed for a 14″ monitor at all.

A second monitor can definitely increase the comfort and velocity; and in consequence the productivity. The only remaining fact to research about is if the cost increment associated with the acquisition and maintenance of the double monitors makes sense… But I’ll leave it to  your own criteria. :)