Hmm, honestly, how do you know that he is one of the most productive people? Like, I have found these kinds of things surprisingly hard to evaluate, and a lot of successful research is luck, so maybe he just got lucky, but not like a “genetic lottery” kind of lucky, but more of a “happened to bet on the right research horse” kind of lucky in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily expect to generalize into the future.
I am partially saying this because I have personally observed a lot of the opposite. Somewhat reliably the most productive people I know have very strong opinions about how they work. And to be clear, most of them do actually not use external monitors a lot of the time (including me myself), so I don’t think this specific preference is that interesting, but they do tend to have strong opinions.
My other hypothesis is just that the conversation somehow caused them to not expose which aspects of their work habits they care a lot about, and the statement about “this merely makes me 10% slower”, was something they wouldn’t actually reflectively endorse. More likely they don’t think of their work as something that has that much of a local “efficiency” attribute to it, and so when they thought through the monitor question, they substituted the productivity question for one that’s more like “how many more to-do list items would I get through if I had a monitor”. If you forced them to consider a more holistic view of their productivity, my guess is some answer like “oh, but by working on a couch I am much more open to get up and talk to other people or start pacing around, and that actually makes up for the loss here”.
Hmm, honestly, how do you know that he is one of the most productive people? Like, I have found these kinds of things surprisingly hard to evaluate, and a lot of successful research is luck, so maybe he just got lucky, but not like a “genetic lottery” kind of lucky, but more of a “happened to bet on the right research horse” kind of lucky in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily expect to generalize into the future.
I am partially saying this because I have personally observed a lot of the opposite. Somewhat reliably the most productive people I know have very strong opinions about how they work. And to be clear, most of them do actually not use external monitors a lot of the time (including me myself), so I don’t think this specific preference is that interesting, but they do tend to have strong opinions.
My other hypothesis is just that the conversation somehow caused them to not expose which aspects of their work habits they care a lot about, and the statement about “this merely makes me 10% slower”, was something they wouldn’t actually reflectively endorse. More likely they don’t think of their work as something that has that much of a local “efficiency” attribute to it, and so when they thought through the monitor question, they substituted the productivity question for one that’s more like “how many more to-do list items would I get through if I had a monitor”. If you forced them to consider a more holistic view of their productivity, my guess is some answer like “oh, but by working on a couch I am much more open to get up and talk to other people or start pacing around, and that actually makes up for the loss here”.