David Carrington

At work I’ve got a pretty nice dual-screen setup. Recently I have become more aware of the personalities that each screen has developed. Personalities? Sure. They don’t talk back to me, but what they show me and how I use them differs greatly:

Screen 1: Mr Left

Mr Left is a creator and a developer. He loves code, databases, and image manipulation. This is where all the real work gets carried out. If I’m being productive, I’m working with Mr Left. Left is currently showing me a SQL query. We’ve also been working together in Visual Studio on some reports. He has the windows start menu, so he’s the one that dishes out work to everyone.

Screen 2: Mr Right

Mr Right is about results. He loves websites, files, task management, and emails. As soon as Mr Left has done his thing, he passes the work over to Mr Right to test. Mr Right gets the final say on whether something is right or wrong. If the final result on the Right isn’t good enough, it gets given back to Left to deal with.

But Mr Right has a secret: he’s all about fun and media. He runs Mozilla Firefox and browses the web. He listens to music on Winamp through the day and occasionally watches videos for lunch. He loves to keep in touch with people, through Outlook E-mails, internal IM using Office Communicator, and keeps an eye on the web in general using Google Reader.

Thank you, Mr Left and Right, for making me more productive.