March 14th, 2008 by James Omdahl
If you’re anything like me, you have a hard time spending your hard earned cash on bigger ticket items, especially if they’re for business, not fun.
Take computer monitors for example. Currently at home I work on my MacBook with a 13.3″ screen. I have a stand for it, and a keyboard and mouse, but I am still working on a tiny screen. To me, this isn’t such a problem and I really don’t notice it, but after reading this article from the Wall Street Journal, I think I’m going to start noticing.
The article cites a University of Utah study that found that having a larger monitor can help you substantially increase your productivity. Based off the study people were tested doing tasks on a 18-inch screen, a 24-inch screen, and two 20-inch screens. The results were pretty amazing.
When people used the two 20-inch screens they were 44% quicker at the tasks assigned to them than with the 18-inch screens. Even more amazingly, the people who used the 24-inch screen were 52% faster at completing tasks.
Interestingly, the researches found that the productivity increases dropped off when a 26-inch screen was used.
Of course, everyone’s experience will differ - and different people will work well with different sized monitors. But if you are like me, working on a small laptop screen at home, it might be time to consider picking up a something larger. I mean, just imagine what a 52% increase in productivity could mean to you and your commissions.
Here are a couple more posts about why and how buying expensive equipment can be more cost effective for you and your company in the long run:
If You Want to Be a Super Affiliate…Act Like One
How to Save Money Running a Startup
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March 14th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Very true. I use 3 30″ monitors and I have found that it has increased my productivity quite a bit over the laptop that I used to use.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:03 am
In past jobs, Ive actually had to determine increase-in-productivity in order to justify purchasing larger monitors for art directors and production artists. I basically just determined the time wasted when you had to scroll around in a document and constantly resize the view. It was pretty easy to ROI a $3- $400 purchase with those figures.