{"id":103616,"date":"2020-03-31T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=103616"},"modified":"2020-03-31T09:00:50","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T16:00:50","slug":"20200331-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20200331-00\/?p=103616","title":{"rendered":"Why am I ignoring my second monitor? A case study in working from home."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.microsoft.com\/on-the-issues\/2020\/03\/05\/covid-19-microsoft-hourly-workers\/\">working from home<\/a>, which is probably what many software developers are doing right now. My usual work area had been a desk in the corner of the family room, because I didn&#8217;t normally do a lot of work from home. Now that everybody is home, that location in the corner of a busy room wasn&#8217;t particularly conducive to working without interruption.<\/p>\n<p>I ended up setting up my temporary home office in our spare bedroom, using a large folding table as a &#8220;desk&#8221;. I bought a second monitor so I could get something that more closely resembled my usual work environment, but I found that I rarely used the second monitor. Eventually, I figured out why.<\/p>\n<p>My two monitors at home were arranged with the main monitor directly in front of me, and the secondary monitor to the right.<\/p>\n<p>At work, I have three monitors on my desk. I use the center and left monitors a lot, but the monitor on the right is connected to a machine I don&#8217;t use much, and I got into the habit of ignoring the monitor on the right.<\/p>\n<p>I moved the secondary monitor from the right side of my main monitor to the left. Now I use both of my monitors.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s weird how these little unconscious things have such a large effect.<\/p>\n<p><b>Bonus chatter<\/b>: <a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/visual-studio-subscriptions-resources-for-remote-learning-and-productivity\/\"> Visual Studio Subscriptions resources for remote learning and productivity<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Settling into the new routine has its rough spots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-103616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Settling into the new routine has its rough spots.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}