First I tried using two 22-inch Dell widescreen monitors side by side, creating one very wide screen, roughly 38 inches measured diagonally. Next, I rotated each display so that its long side ran vertically; this configuration allowed me to read a full document on the screen without scrolling. Copying one of the styles I saw at Google, I then placed one screen vertically and the other horizontally — imagine the letter T on its side, with the wide screen reserved for working with side-by-side windows, and the tall screen for focusing on a single, long document.

Image Credit... Photo Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

I also tried a couple configurations with my laptop: the laptop’s screen plus one wide monitor, the laptop plus one tall one. Finally, I set up the Cadillac Escalade of displays, an enormous 30-inch widescreen monitor made by Gateway. This was the monitor a rap star might use — a screen so large it suggests you’re overcompensating.

Whatever the configuration, my experience confirmed the researchers’ findings: having a lot of screen space significantly raised my productivity.

As every office worker knows, trying to get anything done on a computer that’s connected to the Internet can be a test of wills. On my old desktop monitor — at 19 inches square, it was the Honda Civic of displays — the Web was a wormhole that routinely pulled me off track. I’d switch over to a browser window to look something up, but as soon as I did so all traces of my work would disappear from the screen and I’d forget about the task at hand. A half hour later, I’d wake up from a deep browsing trance, wondering how I ever got to, say, a page recounting the history of Adidas, or some other topic having nothing at all to do with my work.

A huge desktop didn’t remove all distractions, but it blunted their force. Now I could keep my e-mail and the Web open on one screen while my Microsoft Word 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 back 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.