Why You're Never as Productive on the Road as You Are at Your Desk — and the Surprising Reason That Has Nothing to Do With Your Discipline

By Tyler Kosch, CEO, KBS Group Germany

Sound familiar?

You run your business from anywhere. At first, that was the whole dream — work wherever you want, no desk holding you down. But at some point you noticed something you didn't really want to admit: on the road, you're just not as sharp as you are at home.

Not a little. Noticeably. You sit down in a café, a coworking space, a hotel lobby — and suddenly everything feels like wading through mud. You can't get into flow. Tasks that take twenty minutes at home drag on. And by the end of the day you're strangely drained, even though it feels like you barely got anything done.

Most people blame themselves for it. Not enough discipline. Too many distractions. “I just need to focus better.”

I believed that for years. Until I found out it's caused by something else entirely — and that Apple itself is part of the problem.

Quick intro: I'm Tyler Kosch and I run the German KBS Group fully location-independent. Half my life happens on a MacBook.

At home I've got a clean setup: two large monitors next to the laptop. Dashboard on the left, whatever I'm working on in the middle, Slack and email on the right. Everything visible, all at once. I move fast because I never have to hunt for anything.

Then I pack up, sit down at a café — and I'm back to a single 14-inch screen. Suddenly only one window fits. If I'm on a call, my notes and my dashboard vanish behind it — so I'm clicking back and forth live while the other person is talking. So I do what everyone does: Cmd+Tab, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+Tab. All day.

And the worst part: I lose track of my own business. Numbers, tools, conversations — nothing stays in front of me anymore. And because every new spot hands me the same single small screen, it repeats every single day.

What bothered me most wasn't even the lost time. It was the feeling. I run a professional business — and on the road I'm working with half a setup. I never bring my full game when I'm traveling. That quiet sense of losing control over my own business gnaws at you.

The most absurd part was the contradiction: I had deliberately built this freedom. And that same freedom was now costing me performance. Maybe you know all of this. And maybe, like me, you've already tried everything to fix it.

I tried it all. A bigger MacBook? Barely helps — 16 inches instead of 14 doesn't change the fact that it's still one screen. The iPad as a second display over Sidecar? Fine for a single window, but fiddly, small, and always begging to be charged. I even bought one of those portable USB-C monitors you clip onto your laptop.

And that's where it got really frustrating. Because on my MacBook, only one extra screen ever ran. I thought the thing was broken. It wasn't.

Here's the part almost nobody knows: MacBook Air models and the base chips (M1, M2, M3 without “Pro”) only support a single external display out of the box.

That's not an opinion — it's a hard limit Apple builds in. No matter how many monitors you plug in, the system hands you exactly one extra. That's why most portable monitors simply don't work the way you'd expect on a MacBook Air.

That was the moment I understood: it was never about my discipline. And that's exactly where the fix lives — because that limit can be worked around. Manta gets past it, so you finally get multiple extra screens running on the very MacBook that only ever gave you one.

I wanted exactly one product: two full extra screens that fold onto the sides of my MacBook, run over one cable — and actually work on my Air. Nothing did it cleanly. So we built it ourselves. That's Manta.

Manta is two additional 14-inch displays that fold onto the sides of your MacBook. One small screen turns into your full command center — your dashboard stays open, your call lives on one screen, your notes on the other, and you finally see everything at once again. Just like at home. Only everywhere.

Since I started working with Manta, that split between “home” and “on the road” is gone. I sit down at a café, fold out two screens, plug in one cable — and I have my complete setup. I don't juggle windows anymore. I see my numbers while I'm on a call. And that feeling of being only half of myself when I'm traveling is gone. For the first time, location-independent doesn't feel like a compromise — it feels like an advantage.