Come for the Ride…

There are a lot of hard choices to make when you’re a bootstrap startup (and even more so when you’re funded). Mis-managed funds or mis-projections could easily send your startup crashing and burning. However, despite the need to be stringent on money, I do believe there’s value in rocking a dual screen setup.

The first and probably most important reason is that if you know how to pay attention to two screens at once, you will benefit from having both at your disposal. The one thing hungry entrepreneurs lack more than money is time. Cool factor aside, having two screens will actually help increase your productivity.

For example… you’re working on some proposals, need to manipulate an image for the presentation and at the same time you’re communicating with developers over seas or even just your loved ones on IM. Each one of these activities take up screen space and the more clutter you have on your screen, the harder it is for you to concentrate on any one subject. (On a side note, why do I NEED 4-6 chat programs to make sure I can communicate with everyone I outsource? It’s crazy but it’s true…)

Not only is it annoying to try to work on something on top of a few other windows, it’s even more annoying when you have to click back and forth between your primary project, emails, chat windows and/or other documents and web pages you’re referring to.

Though I haven’t officially timed it, having two screens - one large enough to display two full page documents, does help reduce the clutter and make multi-tasking easier and faster. (If you’re lucky enough to own a Mac with Leopard, Spaces really help as well.)

The days where large monitors and multi-screens are reserved only for programmers or designers are over. If you’re an executive, it pays to be able to keep track of multiple things at once. Even if you’re a straight out of college and your job is to generate multiple daily Excel reports, it would benefit you to have the screen estate so you can do your job faster.

Let’s face it… all employees that sit in front of a computer today multi-task at work. Whether it’s switching between the web and various documents, organizing their music play list, or chatting on IM; the amount of things we do at one time on the computer has made it a mess to manage.

While the investment for dual displays may seem pricey for any company, I believe in the long run it will pay itself off in more ways than one. You’ll get more productivity from your team, your employees will be happier and of course there’s the cool factor for your office. Don’t you want to be the cool place where everyone wants to work at? I know I do.

In my day job, we’ve been working on redecorating our office space for the last few months. It started with new *matching* desks replacing the old ones. I swear, I don’t know the original reasoning behind it but everyone literally had a different modeled desk. It was so bad that I thought our office manager had a secret blog that reviewed different models of office desks.

However, now that all desk problems are solved, we’re running into issues on how to divide up the space. Again, we now have various models of dividers and partitions none of which are standard cubicle stuff.

Anyway, I found this Office Snapshots link today which I thought was cool. Maybe one day when our startup upgrades to an office, we’ll have something to look forward to. In the meantime, maybe we can get some ideas to save my day job space.

I miss the freedom of self employment. Where else can you hold two separate iChat work meetings (development and marketing), blast iTunes, watch TV, surf Facebook and be logged into 3 computers all at the same time?

Did I mention I wasn’t wearing pants? Alright, I was wearing pants… but still

I certainly don’t have that kind of freedom during the day.

On a separate and completely unrelated note, can someone help me figure this out?

iPod earphones work on the Macbook
iPhone earphones work on the Macbook
iPod earphones does not work on the iPhone…

what gives?