Digital Declutter: Too Many Tabs
Often we try and treat our tabs as an extension of our working memory - now as a reminder, our working memory is just a form of memory that allows us to temporarily hold a limited amount of information at the ready. We can kind of think of it as a whiteboard - everything we've got on the whiteboard we have access to, but we can also get so much stuff up there before we have to erase it to make room for new information.
And that tends to be a really good use of tabs and why they've become so popular to use. I mean right now I've got a tab open so I can have the definition of working memory handy and another tab open that has my prewrite material and another tab open with my todo list on them. By having those tabs open I can offload some of what I would otherwise just have to keep in my brain.
But what happens when we've got more than just a few tabs open?
As we overload our brains we tend to forget things - we get irritable and tired and slow down. Well, our browsers aren't going to get irritable and they are only going to forget things if they crash... which certainly can be something that happens when you open too many tabs and your computer starts to run a little more sluggishly.
But we're not really worried about our browsers here - because, here's the thing, tabs aren't really an extension of our working memory. We're not really just dropping those things - we're letting them sit as open loops. As a reminder from last week, open loops are unfinished tasks that still need you to do something to mark them as done → and we often leave a tab open because, well, we still need it open for something.
I'll leave tabs open that I might need to reference again. Or I might leave a tab open of an article I want to read. Or I might just leave a tab open for something I don't want to have to reopen. The point is that all these tabs have some sort of reason for being open - they need my attention for some sort of reason. And every time I open up my browser they get some of that attention.
This can be a problem because I've only got so much attention to go around. And we might be saying that well, it's in another tab, if that tab isn't open it isn't vying for my attention → it's just in my... todo list?
Just like email isn't a good task manager, your tabs are not a good task manager either. When we see all those tabs there's no clear indication of what we should be working on next. Instead, we've got a mishmash of crap that we're continuously adding onto.
We leave these tabs as open loops as a way for us to try and keep something running in the background so that we can get back to them when I have "time" but sometimes isn't on my calendar and if it isn't on my calendar then I probably not going to get to it.
Often my surplus of tabs comes from me doing one thing but seeing a link to something that looks interesting. I'll be reading an article online and throughout the article, it'll link to 4 or 5 other articles that relate... well maybe I want to read those too. Oh, but I'm going to be good. I'm going to stay on task. I'll read this article first, but so don't forget I'll just right click and open those links up in a new tab.
This is just FOMO - that fear of missing out - that I won't read something that looks incredible. Or rather more often... this comes from an aspirational place. I see something that seems like it would be a good thing for me to read or watch... but well I'm just not in the mood right now. I'm tired and I just want to mindlessly scroll Reddit for a bit - I just don't have the capacity to really engage with something right now - so I'll just put it in a new tab and save it for when I'm in the mood for it. I mean I won't really label it or anything, I'll just hope that I happen to remember that I have the one hour video of Brandon Sanderson giving a lecture on writing when I'm in the mood to listen to a one lecture... yeah, I should just close that tab because that day's not really coming is it?
Look, there is nothing wrong with having aspirational things that you want to do, but leaving them in tabs isn't the right way to follow them. For one, waiting for inspiration to strike rarely works, and two, man, we've got ADHD - I have soooo many interests that leaving things in tabs like that is going to leave me with 500 tabs of things that I "really want to do" but that's also super overwhelming - it spreads me too thin to ever really follow any passion.
So our question to think about with all these tabs is if they are actually important to us?
Are they actually worth our time?
One of the things that we have to recognize is that we're never going to have time for everything. Over 2.2 million new books are published every year, more than 2.75 million blog posts are posted every day and more than 500 hours of content are uploaded to Youtube every minute. Yeah, that last one... 500hrs/minute - there is simply no way that we could ever keep up with everything - it's literally a physical impossibility. And I didn't even talk about other media types like television, podcasts, or social media.
Of course, we don't actually want to watch or listen to everything. Consuming media 24/7 would be a pretty boring life and we also aren't even interested in everything that comes out - we're probably not interested in most things that come out. None the less, even when we pair down to just the things we're interested in reading, watching, or listening to, there is just too much.
And there are really many great solutions here, except, accepting that well, yeah, I don't get to see everything and that's okay. I recently heard of an interesting improv game where you have about 10 people and all you do is try and come up with movies that everyone in the group has seen. It sounds super simple, but what becomes quickly apparent is that while 8 of the people have seen Jurassic Park, 2 others haven't. And the point of this game for improv to help drive across the idea that what's an obvious reference to you might not be so for someone else and that we all come to things with different experiences. In our case, I think it's a great way to remember that we're not really missing out if we haven't seen or read everything - even those big memes that seem to be everywhere don't reach everyone. I mean I can guarantee there is at least one person listening to this podcast who hasn't seen the Gangnam Style music video despite the fact that it has nearly 4 billion views on YouTube - yeah, billion with a B.
Don't think of it as something you missed, think of it as a future opportunity to see something amazing.
There is part of me that just says, just get a browser that doesn't support tabs... or at least download an extension that prevents new tabs from opening. But that's not really going to help the problem, I'd just have oodles of windows instead. And being able to switch between looking at a few things at once is actually really useful. I mean I recently saw a book wheel from 300-years ago that helped researchers keep 7 books open at once. Tabs can help us synthesize and combine information in different ways. Like I love having multiple tabs open when I'm doing online shopping. Being able to switch through tabs allows me to easily compare what I'm looking at and figure out what I actually want. They're great while I'm doing research because I can open a new tab without losing my place on the page I'm currently on.
What the problem is, is having too many tabs for too many different things.
One solution that I used to use was something called a tab limiter → now I'm not sure which one I used to use, but a popular tab limiter now is xTab which is a browser extension that lets you set the maximum number of tabs you're allowed to keep open on your browser, once you hit that limit it'll close the least accessed tab currently open. Now that last option was kind of horrifying for me so I eventually got rid of it - although I did find a new option simply called Tabs Limiter with Queue that instead of closing old tabs when you are over the limit, instead puts the new tabs in a queue to open once you close old tabs. It's a bit of a workaround but it's still something that doesn't really work with my workflow - when I'm trying to get things done and need tab assistance I don't want to be particularly worried about what I'm opening what needs to get closed. I just mention these options if they might be better options for you.
And really what's a problem is that I don't always get to finish what I'm working on in one session and when I come back to my computer that might not be what I need to be working on.
What can help with this then, is a tab manager - which is just an extension on your browser that can help how you keep control of your tabs.
Now there are a lot of different tab managers that you can use, so I'm only going to talk about a few of the more popular ones here.
Let's start off with OneTab - Once this is installed in your browser all you have to do is click on the OneTab icon in the top right corner and it will condense all of your tabs in that window to a list of URLs in a new tab. If you open tabs in that window you can then click the OneTab icon again and it'll compress those down into a new list. From there you have the option of opening all the tabs again or opening them one at a time - or even sharing that page of links with someone else.
Another option is the extension Toby, which functions essentially the same as OneTab, but instead of a list of URLs, it creates a page with all the links in a card view. From there you can move around the order of the tabs, get rid of some, or open the list. Additionally, you can easily move tabs from group to group, which is a great way to organize groups of tabs that you want to open again later. So you could have a group of tabs that you use for one set of workflows → like when I'm posting a new episode there are about 5 tabs that are useful to have open, I could create that list and then have it ready to open every time I'm getting ready to post.
Finally, there is also a manager called Cluster that again is basically the same as OneTab and Toby, its main difference is that it groups windows a little differently and it doesn't condense everything done with just one click of a button. You can also use it to suspend tabs, which basically is just a way to work on saving memory on your computer. It does have a nifty feature to automatically sort your tabs for you, but overall I found it a little more on the technical side.
Personally, I've been playing around with using Toby - while both OneTab and Cluster offer basically the same service, I found Toby to be the easiest for me to navigate and use, although OneTab is a close second.
And a word about using tab managers - they are definitely not the first tool we want to reach for when we're trying to get our tabs under control. In a lot of senses, tab managers can amplify the problem because they let you open more and more tabs that you can just file away to look at later. For me, what I've found helpful is using them to suspend things that I just don't have time to finish right then but am definitely going to come back to. So this might be a few articles that I'm reading while researching a new episode, or it might be a bunch of tabs I have open while shopping. More aspirational things, like lists of articles I "want" to read of videos I "want" to watch don't fit in with the tab manager system well because they can quickly become overwhelming and things that I'm never going to look at.
This Episode’s Top Tips
We tend to trying and use tabs as an extension of our working memory, but as we open more and more tabs we stretch our mental resources and it can become overwhelming to figure out what we need to take care of.
One of the reasons we open so many tabs is that we're afraid of missing something - be it an article to read, a video to watch, or something in your social feed, our brains tell us we want to see it all. Unfortunately, we're never going to see everything so we've got to work on being choosier about what we focus our attention on and be okay missing some things.
We can install extensions into our browsers to help limit the number of tabs we have open, or install a tab manager to help us keep better track of everything we have open.
