Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

Summary

Keeping my focus has been challenging. It’s not a new phenomenon, and I suspect that there are contributing factors that have lead to the unfocused state dominating. For example, I’ve been that guy who wants to be on top of things, to be in the loop, to respond to urgent issues. It feels fantastic to be in that firefighter role as it gives me the feeling of having an impact, but it results in me being drained at the end of the day and often over-caffeinated. One day I was doing work on my laptop on a couch because hitting 30 apparently means that sleeping slightly incorrectly results in debilitating back pain. During that session, I was working on a larger task and making tons of tiny little changes that needed to be done in order to release a new feature. I was finally in the zone again, and it felt fantastic! That’s when I decided to start an experiment: can I improve my focus by giving up my big monitor? Results I’ve done this type of “experiment” a few times in the past when the power has gone out and my super duper ergonomic setup has become useless. No power, no USB-C dock, no monitor. It wasn’t that fun and my eyes hated reading text off of a laptop screen. A few things have changed since then: GNOME has working fractional scaling that you can simply enable in display settings ThinkPad displays have gotten better, with the picture being quite cromulent, and the 16:10 aspect ratio helps fit more on the screen the nature of my work has changed and will keep changing in the near future Almost a month in, I’ve had a pleasant experience with this experiment. I feel more focused. Yeah, that’s it. Am I actually more focused is up for debate, as I’m not sure how to measure it objectively. Working off of a single screen forces me to focus at what’s at hand. Alt-tabbing to a different app is quick, but just enough to deter me from doing it in meetings or other focused tasks. In my personal free time, this has also resulted in computer use becoming more intentional. On ...