What are your “settings” when you absolutely must get work done?
Mine involves music, an endless supply of coffee, tea or water within arm’s reach, my trusty Logitech MX Master 3s mouse, a large widescreen monitor and absolutely zero interruptions.
When I’m mobile and serious work must happen, I ditch the mouse, pack my AirPods Pro, and haul a portable screen. With croissant crumbs on my T-shirt, I often look like a serious hacker or someone who is monitoring a rocket launch in my over gadgeted tiny Starbucks table built for one.
Dual screens have become non-negotiable for me. One screen hosts all the delightful distractions like email, WhatsApp, Apple Music, YouTube while the other holds the “serious” stuff like Excel, PowerPoint and multiple browser windows with multiple tabs in each browser. If digital real estate is worth anything, I own all of them like a manic Monopoly player.
My daughter discovered this recently. She wandered over while I was doing some casual browsing in the living room and caught me triggering Mission Control on my Mac (three-finger swipe on trackpad for fancy users and Cntl + Up for everyone else). She looked at me, wide eyes, as stamp-sized app windows filled the screen like I’m a digital philatelist.
It’s unfortunate, but multitasking has become a baseline life skill these days. We’re constantly juggling kids’ schedules against client demands against the avalanche of obligations that arrive daily, uninvited, like deposits of facial oil.
Did technology evolve to help us manage this madness or did it create the madness in the first place? Is our ability to do seventeen things simultaneously a genuine productivity superpower, or just a very elaborate way of doing seventeen things poorly at once?
I like that we can do more. I’m just not convinced that always translates to doing better.
Maybe if modern life weren’t so relentlessly demanding, we’d have the luxury of doing one thing slowly and doing it well. Or maybe this is just the reality now, and we iterate our way through the chaos, one cluttered virtual desktop at a time.
I genuinely don’t know and I’d love to hear what you think.