Good reporters distinguish themselves by looking away from the things most of us think are newsworthy, and focusing on small but revealing details. Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times reporter, exemplified this truth when he recently visited the spectacular Google headquarters. There’s enough there to make just about any civilian visitor slaphappy. But,”What caught my attention on a recent visit was something pretty pedestrian: the programmers’ desks. Specifically, their computer monitors,” he writes.

“I recently met several software engineers who work on Gmail, and each sported a spectacular configuration of screens. Some paired wide monitors with tall ones, others had huge screens married to small ones, and still others used several displays in series, giving the impression that in addition to building a Web-based e-mail system, they were helping Norad keep tabs on the nation’s airspace.”

Most of us multitaskers are content to open multiple windows on one normal-sized monitor and navigate between them. Manjoo cites some studies that indicate that two displays, or even one humongous one, are far more effective because you’re able to see more of what you have to do, like spreading all your papers out on the surface of your desk instead of piling them up. Manjoo mentions one in particular:

“In a study commissioned by the electronics company NEC, researchers at the University of Utah recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations. They found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text-editing operations than people using a single 18-inch monitor.”

Whatever effect all these screens may have on your productivity, it’s hard to believe they do much for your eyes. Pictured above is a Google software engineer after fifteen hours of programming on two monitors.

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RC