Never in a million years would I argue against the usefulness of more pixels. It’s a sick, sick addiction. Over the years I’ve moved swiftly from 14-inch CRT, to 15-inch, 17-inch, to 20-inch LCD, to my current 24-inch + laptop dual monitor setup. Oddly, I replace my display more often than my machines, and I’d love to make 24-incher of mine a 30-inc — and if my laptop had more video ports I’d love nothing more than to make that 30-inch two or three 30-inches. I had a very hard time writing that post on the wall of 30-inch monitors. I was too jealous. But I came to an odd realization today: not always does increased screen real estate equal increased productivity.

My argument partly relies on how you define productivity, but for the purposes of this post I’d define it as getting done what you want / need to get done. On my way out to the door of the cafe in which I’m currently sitting and writing this, I realized all these pixels are giving me LCD ADD. So while I can get more things done at once with more displays, I’m constantly bombarded by distractions. At any given time I have 15 IM tabs open, four or five email accounts churning, three browsers with dozens of tabs, two news readers, a text editor, an image editor, calendaring apps, and so on, and so forth. In other words, I have tons of things distracting me from the task at hand, which is more often than not writing. Or reading an article. Or talking to one of Engadget’s writers. Take away those pixels, bury all those windows one on top of the next, and you have a self-imposed work environment — painful though it may be — where I, for one, am actually more likely to finish my task, instead of being distracted by something else. It may take me longer to answer your email, but when I answer it, it certainly won’t take me twenty minutes to craft a two sentence response.
And with that, I’d better stop getting distracted by blogging and get back to my day job. Uh, blogging.

P.S. -Another anti-productivity trick (not applicable to designers): when you’re out and about with your laptop and your screen stacked high with windows, don’t take your mouse. Mice only help you move around faster, navigate your system with ease. Just use your trackpad — it’ll make you slower, but you’ll want to spend more time doing what you need to be doing.