Do bigger monitors significantly increase your productivity?

There are a vast number of studies that look into productivity changes related to screen real-estate. While Apple's study is obviously meant to push sales of their 30-inch cinema display, having dual monitors will work just as well (if not better).

There are also plenty of jobs that can be done much more efficiently with more screen space, most notably programming. If you're writing a graphical application, for example, you'll need to see your program's interface and the debugging code simultaneously. Having more screen real-estate means you can do this easily, instead of having to constantly switch from a running program to the debugging window.

You might find some studies like this one conducted by Microsoft, or this informal study by Darrell Norton to be interesting. The latter article points out that "On average, people would much rather have 2 smaller monitors than 1 larger monitor," which trumps the argument for a single 30" display, but definitely promotes the correlation between screen real-estate and productivity.

I'll take a 30" Apple Cinema display over my single 15" Dell CRT at work any day.

I have two 19" monitors and I get frustrated when I have to work with single screens. It is amazing the difference it makes.

Eric is right - dual montiors improves productivity significantly over a single screen - even a larger screen. I don't have any research to back that up - just my own little mind...

I'd take two 19 inchers over a single 30 incher any day.

re: Dual 19-inchers:

You may be right, but this study doesn't appear to address that issue. Someone needs to buy me two 19-inch monitors and one 30-incher so I can research the issue further ;)

Plus - you can get two 19 inch Dell monitors for $247 each = $494 vs one 30 inch Dell for $1444

P.S. If you like tilting your head sideways to read table

You don't have to hurt your neck unless you want to. Acrobat Reader 7.0 has a button in the tool bar that will turn the page sideways. The button looks like two sheets of paper and it's on the right of the size control panel, between the + button and ABC button.

As far as the monitors, I have two monitors, a 21" monitor and a 17" monitor. I'd never give them up.

Sandra,

They seem to have replaced the PDF with a more neck-friendly one anyway. I prefer Preview to Adobe Reader, but now that I know about that feature, I may be using Adobe products more often!

Chris,

I have 17-inch iMac, so I guess I'm *really* in the stone age on these things. So far, it seems to do the job just fine. Interesting to note that the study also found differences between a 17-inch and a 20-inch display. When what you do is write all day, I'm still not convinced these findings are relevant.

A big part of my research is making/looking at large DNA sequence alignments. Having a big widescreen monitor is invaluable in terms of both ergonomics and productivity...

Oh, Preview has a rotate tool also, it's just not visible on the tool bar. Use command +R to rotate to the right and Command + L to rotate left.

Or open the Tools menu and click Rotate Left or Rotate Right.

I mostly like Adobe Reader because of the highlight feature in Acrobat and because the links and bookmarks, in pdf documents, work.

Thanks, Sandra! I swear I looked at all the menus before I made that comment!

contrary to popular belief, the inches don't matter (unless you are trying to avoid getting bifocals). look at the resolution. the 30" does have more resolution than many monitors, but back to non-rich-person reality. i've wanted to upgrade my 17" monitor for a while, but for some reason no one wants to make 20 inchers with more resolution than i already have. i need more real estate, not bigger pixels.

i've wanted to upgrade my 17" monitor for a while, but for some reason no one wants to make 20 inchers with more resolution than i already have. i need more real estate, not bigger pixels.

:Sigh: I know what you mean. I think I know why it is though: User interfaces are far too tied to the pixel as a unit. Sometimes I want smaller text, and sometimes I want sharper text, but what I get is whatever the UI designer hard-coded. Which means that high resolution gets you itty-bitty text/buttons/controls whether you want them or not. Microsoft for a long time supported units not tied to the pixel (even back in the 3.1 days IIRC), which in theory would allow scaling UIs independently of the screen resolution. In practice too many things broke with a non-default scale; such is life with crappy software.

I've heard about little bits of research claiming that bigger monitors correlate with increased productivity. While I can't speak to the strength of the research (especially if it's sponsored by Apple, much as I love the company), I'll say that using a bigger monitor certainly feels more productive, which may in turn lead to actual productivity.

I do know that my tiny, dim, CRT monitor at work is killing my eyes. My vision has blurred as much in the past year as it did in four years of college.

Jonathan:

Yikes! It is possible that the vision decline would have occurred anyway, but that's appalling!

I have a Dell 30-incher (2560x1600 pixels) and a 24-incher (1920x1200 pixels). This setup is a *huge* boon to my productivity. I can readably view and/or edit a full two-page spread of a grant application or journal article at one time on the 30-incher, and have palettes and other stuff open on the 24-incher.

I certainly feel more hardcore ... and computer nerdy cool when I have two monitors...

anybody who does design work needs more pixels: keep the tool palettes and inspectors away from the view of the work itself. Web design, photographic work, mechanical, electrical design, programming, astrophotography, molecular modelling, all share this requirement. Not all are going to be outsourced.

Two 17" monitors at 1280x1024 are way cheaper - about $200 each. That's my solution.

At home, i have a Mac II with twin 640x480 monitors. That's a total of 614,400 pixels. It seemed easier to work with twin documents than a single 1024x768 monitor (786,432 pixels). Of course, this is an Apples to Linuxes comparison. Your oranges may vary.

Now that the Linux box has 1600x1200, i don't worry about it anymore.

Resolution is more important than size, but you need a big screen to comfortably work with high resolutions.
I agree with the sentiments on dual screens mentioned above. Getting a second screen was the biggest improvement in productivity of the past few years. That includes buying a new computer.
Most people I know (including myself) have most of their windows maximised most of the time. Only in very specific cases will I resize my windows to fit multiple on the same screen.
Most of the programmers work in the same way, and design their programs from the assumption that they will be used full-screen.
That's even true for high-profile software like MS-Office.
There are some many toolbars and sidebars that there is hardly any space left for the real content, when running in a small window. Most of these bars can be turned of, but most users can't be bothered to actually do that.
The result is a lot of ALT-TABbing.
A second screen allows me to run two applications at the same time in all their full-screen glory.

I think it is not as easy as higher resolution and/or more monitors are better. More monitors change the way you work - you don't close down windows, just move them. You don't need to be as organized as you can easily find everything with your eyes. Of course in some work this is a real boost, for example graphics editing, but not always.

I am using two different setups. One computer with 3 monitors and then my laptop. I have not seen that I am more productive with the 3 monitors than with my laptop when doing work, and that has do to with distractions: With the 3 monitor setup I don't close down the e-mail, rss feeds, torrents, news stream, msn, google talk, etc. And the way these programs are working, you immediately get noticed when something is happening - distracting you from the real work.