Software engineer. I use three monitors. I primarily use macOS, if anyone’s curious.

Main monitor is a 42" 4K LG C3 OLED, two side monitors are 34" 4K LG IPS displays in vertical orientation.

For work, I keep my IDE and browser on my main monitor and I use it for most other applications that I might use, but usually just my IDE and browser.

Left monitor is used primarily to display my Jira board and tickets, which takes up the bottom 2/3 of the screen. I use Firefox’s video pop out feature to place YouTube or other videos in the top 1/3 so I can watch them while I work, if I want.

Right monitor is used primarily for Slack and Spotify. Slack takes up the bottom half. Spotify takes up the top half, and I often listen when I’m not watching videos.

Could I do all of this with spaces? Of course. Absolutely. I’ve had a one monitor setup, two monitor setup, and now a three monitor setup. Honestly, I really just like that I don’t have to switch spaces all the time. I can reference my Jira tickets while I work and chat with people all at the same time without having to switch spaces around any time I want to see certain details about something in a ticket or something someone said.

I also play games (separate PC) and stream, so the three monitors is useful for that, as well. I have the game up on my main monitor, and I use the side monitors to show my Twitch chat/bot, OBS, Discord, etc.

I currently have three monitors + a laptop, but its actually two separate workstations with two monitors each. I used to have a few more, but I definitely didn’t get that much benefit from 3+ per workstation. My main benefit was being able to keep chats, email, and music player readily available/visible while still having two full screens for work.

I have three, but while I felt the move from 1 to 2 all those years ago was an insanely huge boost at work, I find 3 to be a nice to have, but I don’t miss it if I only have 2.

Others may have a workflow that heavily relies on three, but I don’t get pissed off until circumstances whittle me down to only one.

I work in IT. I have three, 2 standard orientation and a third vertical.

I use one for email and tickets, one for general browsing and remote administration, and the vertical one split horizontally with Teams on top and my terminal client/file browser on the bottom.

Three monitors for work and sometimes wish for a 4th. I’m doing research and pulling info from various documents into one document with commentary. A 4th would be nice so I could have email and chat on it. I’ve missed people asking me questions because I had documents in front of the chat and missed the pop-up. Sometimes you need 5 programes and then multiple documents open to understand what going on to explain it and then have to copy and paste from various documents.

For personal I liked it when I had 4 monitors. Main for web browsing and one for chats. The other two, one for playing video or music and the other to drag stuff to. The other two really shined when I would do photo editing or writing. Spreading things out over 3 monitors made things easier. Right now with my living situation I’m pretty much on a laptop so one monitor. Really makes photo editing not as fun and writing when I need to keep pulling up references stuff outright frustrating at times. I actually have more than 4 monitors at home since I kept picking them up at thrift stores, (DVI into USB adapters are nice) but didn’t find any real benefit to more than 4. But once everything settles I plan on getting my 4 monitors setup back and a Linux station for certain projects with 2 monitors and Raspberry Pi with 1 monitor.

• Outlook (tasks, inbox, and calendar) on the left screen (sometimes vertical)
• Main work window on the right screen.
• Underneath is my laptop screen with Teams and Notepad++.

Remove 1 screen = reduce my productivity by maybe 20%.

Remove one more screen = reduce by at least another 40%.

2 monitors.

Primary is for what I’m focusing on. Secondary is for things I need to look at while the primary is up.

Creative entrepreneur. Center screen is for whatever I’m currently working on, be that product design, our website, emailing clients or suppliers, research, whatever. Right screen will have relevant reference material for whatever is on the center screen. Left screen is for music controls/discord, but it’s also a drawing tablet for any time I need to drop the mouse and start hand-drawing for design work, at which point the music and chat move to the right screen.

I have two. Early career I found the second one absolutely improved my productivity - perhaps by 50% or more - as it helped me multitask really effectively.

Now, later in my career I have had kids for a while. My multitasking went out the window when I had kids - I find it hard to juggle more than one or maybe two things I’m working on at a time. I suspect this was due to poor sleep - parents never seem to really catch up to sleeping full nights like before kids. Instead of multitasking on lots of small things I transitioned to more in-depth work where I can focus for longer periods on a single thing.

Now, I think having a second monitor is still useful but I can function fine without it. It’s maybe a 10% boost if that.

I currently run 3 and am actively trying to figure out how to get more in my space.

I want my workstation to look like Neil Peart set it up.

I’m in IT/remote administration and have 3 monitors. The left is my main screen and where ticketing/remote windows live, middle screen is email/chats/research, and the right screen is a smaller, portrait oriented monitor for reading long documents (or trying to follow my own code) or I’ll throw my security camera feed and YouTube on that one to have visible out of the corner of my eye.

WFH is one laptop and 2 screens. Email is on Portrait mode screen. That one is also great for reviewing long-ass PDFs. It’s a FUCKING DELIGHT I tell you.

The old data I have from the industrial engineering work was that going from one to two monitors was a 40% productivity speed up, then from two to three was about a 5% speedup, then three to four was a productivity loss.

Those numbers were on general workloads, not for specialists. It was also with UI design from 20 years ago, and the way interfaces work now the numbers are likely different.

Personally, I immediately try to get a second monitor because having only one means I lose a lot of focus and mental time just swapping the active on screen windows, but a rarely seek out a third, though a third is nice for overflow tools (chat, docs, music) to have a third screen.

I’m an engineer (a non-IT engineer) and have 4. There is so much ensuring consistency between drawings and documents. I’d like 5 (including the inbuilt one) but graphics card on my high performance company laptop says no.

At least one for file explorer, then other three could be pdf editor, or word, or excel, or internet browser.

I regularly have 4 drawings open, plus another reference, plus windows explorer for file management.

It’s never enough. I could totally do with more than 4 screens, I’m already squeezing multiple drawings onto one monitor.

Accountant. Constantly comparing two different files, or looking at one app and one spreadsheet. I also maintain a couple of the applications and again, need to look at something while entering it, or look at support thread while working to fix the application.