Ben Wiseman

In her role at MaRS Discovery District, a startup incubator in Toronto, Karen Schulman Dupuis reads 10,000 to 15,000 words a day onscreen. But she finds that impossible on her laptop, with all the email barking for her attention. “I need to put myself in a situation where I can really focus,” she says. So when she gets to a long article, she uses a browser shortcut to send it to her iPad. All day long, she'll switch back and forth from one screen to another, shifting between reading and communicating.

She's not the first to hit on this strategy. Now that people have several devices at work—a laptop, a phone, a tablet—they're finding their way to a similar trick, where they use each piece of hardware for a different purpose. Consider it a new way to manage all the digital demands on our attention: Instead of putting different tasks in different windows, people are starting to put them on different devices.

Like Schulman Dupuis, many people have adopted the multiscreen approach to beat back distraction: Paul Bridger, a startup founder based in Europe, says he uses social apps like Twitter only on his iPad Mini so he won't be seduced by them on his laptop. For Doug Belshaw, a web-literacy lead for Mozilla, it's about making multiple tasks quickly glanceable. He puts to-do apps on a tablet that he keeps next to his desk like a physical calendar. “Ideally, I'd have a separate device for every activity,” he says.

At the heart of this multiscreen life is a counterintuitive realization: that a profusion of devices can help focus one's attention rather than fracture it. A pile of browser tabs on your laptop becomes mentally confusing; tasks get hidden and maybe forgotten. But when screens are physically separate, the problem evaporates.

In a sense, screens are beginning to absorb some of the cognitive ergonomics of paper, one of the oldest reading devices of all. With paper, after all, we've always put down one document and picked up another, shifting our attention organically. And as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper note in The Myth of the Paperless Office, spreading out papers on a desk lets our eyes easily roam—a property hard to replicate on a single screen. Now the plunging price of hi-res mobile devices means it's possible to own a few of them.

This trend is only going to accelerate as screens become ever more paperlike—smaller, cheaper, lighter, even bendable. Sony this spring unveiled a thin E Ink display that lets you scribble on digital documents just as you would on paper. And a lab at Queens University in Ontario has produced a remarkable prototype it calls PaperTab, a screen that has the size, thickness, and flexibility of a regular sheet of paper.

Of course, there's no guarantee that a welter of screens will improve our focus: If we don't use them mindfully, multiple devices could shred our working hours just as capably as the jumble of tabs does today.

Nonetheless, all these experiments in device-juggling point the way toward a weird and welcome technological future—in which our desks are piled with screens but our workload somehow feels lighter.