Iposture January 16, 2009
Posted by wannamakemoney in : Uncategorized , trackbackA simple test to see if you work for a smart company
If you are at work when you read this, look ahead of you. What do you see?
If you answered two or three you work for a company that realizes both that more screen space greatly improves worker productivity and that pretty good sized screens are quite cheap now.
Nice 22-inch monitors retail for less than $200 these days, which means that if you work for a fair-sized company, it would pay a lot less than that. In other words, for well less than what your company probably pays you for a day’s efforts (particularly if you add in the cost of benefits) it could make you way more productive.
Why haven’t more companies figured this out? It’s like free money for them.
This question has puzzled me for some time, but I mention it now because the NYT just ran a piece by a reporter who tried it for himself and confirmed (for himself, at least) what all the studies have shown:
a huge desktop didn’t do in all distractions, but it blunted their force. instanter i could keep my e-mail and the web open on rhyme partition off while my microsoft to make a long story short document ran on another. this kept me on task. even if i did go off to the web, my document was always visible, beckoning me to come ruin to work.
But it wasn’t just that multiple monitors reduced distractions; the setup also increased my efficiency when I did finally get around to working. I typically use two main programs when writing articles — Word and a text editor in which I’ve compiled all my notes. For instance, as I’m writing this story in Word, I’m switching back to my text editor to search for pertinent data. When I find that information, I select it, copy it and switch back to Word to paste it. This is a common office task, perhaps the main thing we do on computers. We search for raw data in our e-mail and on the Web, then transfer that info into Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
But on a small monitor, this frequent task presents a cognitive challenge, says Jane Payfer, the chief marketing officer at Ergotron, the company that makes the excellent ergonomic monitor stands that I used to set up my displays in different ways. Every time you bring up a new window on your screen, your eyes and brain need to orient themselves to the new picture, a bit of mental processing that can slow you down. In a multimonitor setup, the brain rests easy: My notes now sit on one side of the dual screen while my Word document sits on the other. When I focus on one program, I don’t lose my place in the other.
That seems like practical information for a newspaper company to realize. Hint. Hint.
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