You're Using Your Second Monitor Wrong - Here's How

Unless you're using a single ultra-wide monitor, you're probably familiar with a dual-monitor, side-by-side layout, offering tons of extra space in landscape orientation to lay out documents for your workflow.  But have you ever noticed that not all productivity programs are designed to be laid out side by side or in a landscape orientation? In essence, this means that if you've got your dual displays laid out like this, you may be doing it the wrong way.

Enter: the vertical display. Most monitor arms allow users to rotate their screen to a 90-degree, portrait-oriented angle. Why is that? Well, some programs or workflows actually lend themselves much better to this orientation — effectively offering more space up and down than left to right. Plus, if this vertical orientation is paired with a second monitor in horizontal orientation, you could have the best of both worlds for whatever your workday needs.

It's actually not all that difficult to put a display on its side, into vertical mode. Most after-market monitor arms that clamp to your desk feature a fully swiveling attachment arm that will let you freely rotate your display on its axis to orient it up and down instead of left and right. Many of these arms also offer locking sections to ensure it's lined up just right. This orientation has also become so popular that many premium monitors feature stand mechanisms that allow you to swivel your monitor.

Once the monitor is physically in the position you want (our recommendation is one monitor in landscape, the other in portrait), there's the matter of getting your operating system to read the monitor in the correct position. After all, most monitors don't have accelerometers in them to auto-rotate the screen when the device is rotated. On the latest macOS, navigate to the Displays menu in System Settings and scroll down to the Rotation line and choose the option you want. From there, you're free to arrange the displays alongside each other using Mac's graphical editor.

On PC, it's a similar workflow. Navigate to the Display menu either by heading to the Settings menu or searching it from the Start Menu. Once on this page, you'll see a Display orientation dropdown. Here, you're free to pick the orientation you want and adjust the layout in the same way you did on the Mac.

So now that we know the "how," let's get into why adding a vertically oriented display to your setup could help. Many displays sport 16:9 aspect ratios and full 4K resolution to provide a nice, wide working area with plenty of pixels to position windows and view apps. While this is very familiar for anyone who has a TV or has been to the movies, it isn't always the best choice for productivity work. While a designer or video editor may appreciate this wide space, and someone who is working in text editors or email apps might be used to putting windows side by side, this isn't always how our eyes work.

Think about the last time you read a really long article. Your finger was probably glued to the scroll wheel as you were cranking through it. What if more of that vertical scroll was visible on a screen at the same time? That may help to keep you focused and limit having to move through a specific window's scroll.

Consider more specialized work apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams. These apps also feature long lists of conversations and "channels" that you may want to jump around to and from. If you can make these windows bigger vertically, they might be easier to navigate. Developers and programmers also love vertical displays because they allow their coding tools of choice to show full lines of code with much less scrolling or interruption. The name of the game here, really, is to consider what apps you want to scroll less on or see more vertical space, and leverage a portrait-oriented display to offer an uninterrupted view.