From my NYT article on working with two monitors:
…over the last few weeks I began a personal quest for multiple-monitor Zen. I got my hands on several displays and paired them up in every way possible way.
First I tried using two 22-inch Dell widescreen monitors side by side, creating one very wide screen, roughly 38 inches measured diagonally. Next, I rotated each display so that its long side ran vertically; this configuration allowed me to read a full document on the screen without scrolling. Copying one of the styles I saw at Google, I then placed one screen vertically and the other horizontally — imagine the letter T on its side, with the wide screen reserved for working with side-by-side windows, and the tall screen for focusing on a single, long document.
I also tried a couple configurations with my laptop: the laptop’s screen plus one wide monitor, the laptop plus one tall one. Finally, I set up the Cadillac Escalade of displays, an enormous 30-inch widescreen monitor made by Gateway. This was the monitor a rap star might use — a screen so large it suggests you’re overcompensating.
Whatever the configuration, my experience confirmed the researchers’ findings: having a lot of screen space significantly raised my productivity.
