I think the big caveat, or really, necessary adjustment to the title, is "if all you're doing is writing and you've got your email client up on the other monitor like a chump".

I was honestly expecting this to be a study, some sort of university eye-tracking experiment that had some evidence. Instead I got:

> I turned off the extra screen on my desktop computer...I found something increasingly elusive in our multiscreen world: focus...I have no research proving you’ll find as much benefit from a single monitor as I did.

Oh, ok.

> While extra monitors might increase productivity in certain situations — the sort of situations that can be easily tested in a research setting — they seem to do so at a high cost, by displaying a stream of digital splendors, constantly vying for your attention.

Or, perhaps the sort of situations where the user is trying to be productive? "Digital splendors"? If you're using your second (or third, what have you) monitor for fucking YouTube videos, no, you're not going to be magically more productive.

Then we have the biggest non sequitur I've seen in "print":

> ...people using a dual-display machine to do a text-editing task were 44 percent more productive than those who used a single monitor.

Good so far.

> But for most people, the time spent juggling two windows or scrolling across large documents isn’t the biggest bottleneck in getting work done. Instead, there’s a more basic, pernicious reason you feel constantly behind — you’re getting distracted.

Yes, being distracted can indeed be bad. We haven't established why dual monitors would inherently create distractions though.

> Studies show that office workers are interrupted every four to 11 minutes by external distractions including phone calls, email and people who stop by your desk to chat about the weekend.

Phone calls, the number of emails you receive and people coming over to your desk is not going to change with additional monitors. These distractions lay outside the domain of the concern of a second monitor's impact on productivity.

> Then there are self-motivated distractions, when, for no apparent reason, you quit working on your project and do something else — for instance, jump into the rabbit hole of the web.

Which can be done just as readily with a single monitor.

> “The second screen can also be an inviting entry-way for self-distraction,” Ms. Mark said. That’s because it’s an ever-present, available canvas calling out for you to fire up a web window and find solace in the latest thrills on YouTube.

Is your second monitor an empty "canvas"? Listen, if you're going to visit YouTube, you're going to do that with or without 2, 3 or 4 monitors.

Anyhow, this reads like click bait, I think I've spent too more time critiquing the article than the author spent writing it. As a front end engineer, and with 2 Thuderbolts and 1 Macbook Pro, I use all my screens to their maximum potential. This morning while working on our public site I had my localhost site running fullscreen on one thunderbolt, my code in vim running on the other, and the photoshop comp on the Macbook. When strictly in JS mode I'll typically have the same setup but docs or gitx running on the laptop.

If you're choosing to be distracted, no, a second monitor isn't going to somehow change that.