Why I Ditched the Second Monitor
What follows is purely personal—your setup might be perfect for you. But if any of this resonates, I’d be glad.
My studio is a 30-square-meter space in the heart of Łódź, Poland. For five years I’ve been building projects, recording tutorials, and designing courses with a big external monitor paired to my laptop. It felt efficient—until I noticed something odd.
I wasn’t coding so much as transcribing. I’d park my script or reference code on the second screen and spend entire sessions swivelling my head left to right thirty-plus times a minute, copying line after line. If that second screen went dark, I’d panic. My own thinking slowed.
The dependence started to feel like the way we lean on AI tools. A calculator helps with a complex equation, sure, but it doesn’t replace understanding. ChatGPT can be a spark, not a stand-in. My extra monitor had become a stand-in.
Last week I unplugged it. Now it’s just me and the laptop. Notes live on an iPad or a sheet of paper when I need them. And something shifted: I write from memory, plan in my head, and feel my brain working instead of my eyes darting. The simple act of getting stuck—sitting with a problem—feels good again.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been reminded that the hard way matters. From 2009 to 2011 I worked for a Japanese company in Algeria. One day I made a tiny mistake—an extra dot on a document. My manager, Yuki Takahashi (“Yuki” means snow in Japanese), looked at me and said:
“Amir-san, don’t take the easy way. Perfect what you can. The easy way is bad; the hard way pays off.”
Those words never left me. Shortcuts can feed you like junk food: satisfying now, costly later.
So here I am, back to a single screen. It’s slower, and that’s the point.
How about you? Do you thrive with a wall of monitors, or does less help you think more?
Thanks for reading—stay safe, and see you next time.
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