A serious multi-screen setup
As a professional day trader or internet poker player, your entire business depends on the computer. You need a blazing fast connection, good hardware and most importantly a spectacular monitor. Your pc monitor acts as the eyes of your computer, allowing you as a human to see all of the information it would typically display in code and numbers. That’s not so helpful to us, so thankfully pc monitor companies have taken it upon themselves to develop these wonderful interfaces for us to connect with.
In the high-speed professions that I mentioned above a large and powerful monitor is the best choice. Often times it’s not about the actual size of the screen in inches, but the resolution of a monitor. You can have a 17 inch monitor that displays more information than a 30 inch monitor as long as it can support a higher resolution. Of course, it’s going to be the best play to get a monitor that is both large in inches and in resolution if you have a highly visual computer job, or simply need a lot of information on your screen at once.
The productivity loss of switching, minimizing and maximizing different windows all of the time has been reported to eclipse 25% – a staggering amount of work that could be done. Imagine if you were 25% more productive right now – you would literally be getting one extra thing done for every four that you completed. Expanded over the course of a month or year, you’re looking at a lot of extra work.
This is the argument that I like to give to people who say that big, high resolution monitors are simply too expensive for them to buy. If they can get a lot more work done and make more money as a result, the monitor will pay itself off in no time at all – sometimes as short as a week! I know a professional poker player who was able to play four more tables at once when he switched from a 20 inch to a 30 inch monitor. At his hourly rate of $20 per table, he was making 80 extra dollars an hour. It only took him a couple days of playing to pay off his new purchase.
While not every case is this extreme, there is no doubt that pc monitors are a necessary consideration if you have any type of job that has you spending even a quarter of your working time on a computer. The difference in productivity and overall enjoyment in the workplace is too astounding to ignore. If you haven’t already, take a look at the market for pc monitors lately and make a decision on whether upgrading is a good choice for you. If you have to, ask (or beg) your boss to make the switch for you – use the productivity argument – it works like a charm! I personally know a couple people who have used that argument and then followed through with real results, and their boss went from micromanaging them to becoming their best friend. I’m not saying it was all due to the monitor, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
