Bill Gates had a great idea with getting a computer on every desktop, but he fell short with that goal. Every company should have two to three monitors on every desktop!
Think about how many seconds each hour that you wait for windows or a browser to open and close. Add all of that open and close time together and you waste minutes each day. Those wasted minutes would be completely obliterated by having multiple screens open at the same time. And additional monitors don’t cost very much anymore – only around $150. The time saved and additional productivity gains well off-set that small investment.
I coach and mentor CEOs to use your additional monitors by having your web browser open on one at all times, and keep Google as your homepage (you likely use it more than anything else). I keep Twitter as my homepage and I have a little Google Search bar in Firefox so I get the best of both worlds. On your second monitor, keep your email open, but keep it open in draft mode. I also set up my mail client to only sync and find new mail manually. I don’t want it reloading new messages as they arrive. I find that it makes it easier to only check a couple times a day when I don’t see new messages arriving. On my laptop (the third monitor) I’d be using whatever application I’m working on (which happens to be Word, since I’m typing this right now). Also, in using a Mac, I’ve set up ‘Spaces’ so I can have nine application windows open and very quickly shift between them.
Do whatever it takes to shave off ANY downtime so that you can perform even better.
