There is now an advantage to having a laptop, a tablet, your phone and perhaps even a desktop screen too: it will increase your productivity – as well as just being awesome of course.

Now that people have several devices at work—a laptop, a phone, a tablet—they’re finding their way to a similar trick, where they use each piece of hardware for a different purpose. Consider it a new way to manage all the digital demands on our attention: Instead of putting different tasks in different windows, people are starting to put them on different devices.[…]

In a sense, screens are beginning to absorb some of the cognitive ergonomics of paper, one of the oldest reading devices of all. With paper, after all, we’ve always put down one document and picked up another, shifting our attention organically. And as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper note in The Myth of the Paperless Office,spreading out papers on a desk lets our eyes easily roam—a property hard to replicate on a single screen. Now the plunging price of hi-res mobile devices means it’s possible to own a few of them.

This is motivation to either save up and invest in a few more devices for your business OR better yet, get your company to sponsor them in the name of increased profits for your bosses.

It is a win all round really.

It also means you can keep it a secret how much you really check Twitter and Facebook while you are supposed to be working!

More info from Wired available here.