A second monitor has completely changed my everyday life

Can a second monitor really influence everyday life that much? Yes, it can – MeinMMO author Benedikt Schlotmann explains how his second monitor has completely changed his everyday life.

“I don’t want to give up my second monitor!” My friends and colleagues had told me something like that over and over again. But I always asked myself: Is that really true? Can a second monitor be such a big improvement that I don’t want to be without it anymore?

This question has been going through my head a lot over the past few months. On the occasion of Black Friday I finally bought a second monitor. Because in the monitor area there were actually one or the other good offer on Black Friday, while the rest was rather disappointing.

Now I think that was one of my best decisions in 2021. Because the second monitor has made my everyday work at the desk a lot easier. By the way, I opted for a Full HD monitor when I bought it, even if my colleague Patrick Freese was already totally enthusiastic about his WQHD monitor in 2020.

A second monitor improved my productivity and my overview

That was the problem: Up until now, I had a limited work surface with a monitor. In the last few months I have often lost track of things when I had a lot of tasks or had to sort things out.

Many operating systems also offer you several virtual workspaces, but at some point I lost track of what I had put where.

Basically you can imagine my problem like a desk: If the desk is full, then you will start to stack the things on top of each other and probably put bookmarks or the like on the things. In the worst case scenario, you won’t find anything, put everything in a box and start all over again. For me, this is the case when I have 120 tabs open in my Firefox and actually no longer know what I have opened.

This is how my everyday life has changed: With my second monitor, I double this area. Instead of a desk, I can now spread my things over two areas. I can move unimportant things to the other monitor and don’t start stacking everything on one desktop.

And that has significantly improved my work and my workflow:

• Before, I had dozens of windows open in the background. Now I can easily distribute things on two monitors and switch much faster.
• I can now type some text on the left while seeing the email on the right that I want to answer.
• I don’t have to switch back and forth between dozen of windows during my work because I have several windows open next to each other. The many unnecessary clicks are thus eliminated.
• On the left side I can open an important presentation while I see my colleagues on the other monitor.

Not every game supports two monitors

While working with two monitors is a real pleasure and a significant improvement in my everyday life, it looks a little different with gaming.

The real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, for example, supports a setup of two monitors and I can command thousands of units through the area. The racing game Need for Speed: Paypack also supports two monitors. My graphics card also works accordingly. So it’s only worth it if you have a graphics card in the computer that provides enough power for two monitors. Alternatively, you can use a technique like AMD FSR to get more FPS.

But the dual-monitor setup does not work with all games: Above all, a number of indie titles such as Kingdoms: Two Crown or the Pokemon clone Temtem do not support this. There are sometimes ugly artifacts here or the option is not even offered to me. In the end, I switched to using the second monitor for Discord or something similar. This is especially interesting for all those people who want to turn their setup into a streaming room.

Think about it early enough if you want a second monitor

Due to the Black Friday offer at the time, I combine two monitors from different manufacturers at my workplace. In desktop mode, the differences are barely noticeable, if at all, since texts or websites look the same on both monitors.

In gaming, the differences are particularly noticeable when you use different display technologies. My primary monitor offers significantly better contrast and black levels, while the other monitors deliver richer colors. One possibility here is to calibrate the monitors so that the colors match each other again.

Another thing is more of a personal inclination, because I shovel work and new windows onto the left monitor and then move things to the right side. Even when gaming, it often happens to me that I do almost everything on the left side. The opponents roll over my outpost in the right half of the picture? No problem, then I’ll move my left section to the right.

I don’t want to give away my second monitor anymore

Hardly anything has changed my everyday life as much as a second monitor. That sounds very exaggerated at first. But if you’ve worked with one monitor for years and suddenly have two devices and can work with them, then that makes a lot of things much easier.

In everyday life I save a good amount of time, which I can now invest in other and more meaningful things. I’m still a bit ambivalent about gaming. On the one hand, I like being able to play games in large format, but not all games support that.

What do you think about that? Do you already have a second monitor at your workplace and can you share similar positive experiences or do you think my view is overrated? Discuss with us in the comments and tell us what you think of it!

The best gaming monitors for PC in 2021