Was my experience with a single screen simply a function of personal preference, or was it a demonstration of the fundamental problem of working on two or more displays?

Unlike monitor makers with their multidisplay studies, I have no research proving you’ll find as much benefit from a single monitor as I did. But research from another academic domain, the study of how we focus in increasingly addled workplaces, suggests my experience might not be unusual. While extra monitors might increase productivity in certain situations — the sort of situations that can be easily tested in a research setting — they seem to do so at a high cost, by displaying a stream of digital splendors, constantly vying for your attention.

“Two monitors are a double-edged sword,” said Gloria Mark, a professor who studies workplace distractions at the University of California, Irvine. Ms. Mark hasn’t specifically researched how second monitors might affect focus, and when she recently had a chance to work at a two-monitor machine, she felt that it did make some of her tasks easier. “But most people have their email up on the second screen, and of course, when anything comes in, it’s a great source of distraction,” she said

The conventional argument in favor of dual monitors rests on what might be called the two-window problem. Imagine, for instance, the process of writing a research report. You have a word processor open in one window, and, somewhere else on the screen, a web browser full of tabs pointing to research papers. To write the report, you need to shift your attention frequently from the browser to the word processor and back again. On a small display, it would be difficult to keep both windows open at the same time, so you’d waste time switching from one to the other. On a large multiscreen display, you can keep both windows open on your screen — and you save all that switching time.

Image Credit... Stuart Goldenberg

The research supports this. One study commissioned by NEC and conducted by researchers at the University of Utah showed that people using a dual-display machine to do a text-editing task were 44 percent more productive than those who used a single monitor.