Upgrade Your Home Office with a Second Monitor

With more people working from home for the foreseeable future, it might be time to make some improvements to your work-from-home (WFH) setup to maximize efficiency in whatever form your new domestic office has taken. One of the easiest but most transformative changes you can make to your workspace is the addition of a second monitor or, in some cases, an upgrade to a single ultra-wide monitor. In either case, the emphasis is to give yourself more screen real estate with which to work. Much like having a larger physical desk to handle a greater amount of paperwork, increased screen space makes it easier to multitask and more effective to juggle multiple documents, tabs, windows, applications, and so on. Let’s take a look at some of the different scenarios, along with some ideas for a second or new monitor for home.

Dell U2518D UltraSharp 25" 16:9 HDR IPS Monitor

In many cases, one of the most common situations is having just a laptop as your primary computer. This computer obviously has a single screen, and it’s typically a small screen at that. A simple way to transform this setup to a more well-rounded at-home working configuration is with the addition of an external monitor, which will now let you use both the laptop’s screen in addition to the second, larger monitor. When working with two different sizes like this, I tend to treat the smaller screen like a toolbox or assign it a very specific task, like being there solely for email or messaging, while using the other monitor for more general and revolving tasks, like photo editing, video editing, browsing, writing, and spreadsheets.