Don’t keep so many open tabs, hoarder!
Project management should be used on reading and blogging.
I used to have more than 25 tabs open, but only 5 read in a browser session. 20% of tab usage is not a very efficient use.
It’s not just a drain on my computer’s performance. It is lack of organization and planning.
Angus Kidman put it nicely in his lifehacker post why too many open tabs is a problem regardless of computer performance,
“You Can’t Process That Much Information Simultaneously”
Dozens of open tabs signifies either procrastination on a truly epic scale or a chronic inability to focus on an immediate task at hand. Either way, it’s not the sign of someone working efficiently. I work as a journalist — sourcing information from multiple sources is a big part of the job — but I don’t kid myself I need thirty of them open at once. Absorb the data from one place, then move on.
Lots of my open tabs are related to my research on my undergraduate thesis, blog post, news analysis, holiday ideas, or interesting recipes.
My reason/excuse to have the tabs open is that “I am doing some research on _____. I’m half-way through, I will come back later. I don’t want to lose it.” So, I keep them there, idled and cluttered.
After it became impossible to know which tabs are what, I began to institute a rule for myself — don’t go over 15 tabs.
Effective, but not useful in lowering it to 5 0r even 10. Nor did it solve the procrastination issue. It’s treating the symptoms, but not the cause.
When the root cause of this behavior is not tackled, the cluttering remains.
The reasons why I do research and why I wanna come back to those open tabs later are one of the three objectives below.
- I want to learn about the subject,
- I want to blog about it,
- I want to decide what to do in my next vacation or career step.
If I can finish objective, I can close the tabs with no regrets.
Thus, I decided to try something new. Before I close my browser, I will ask myself what’s the objective of keeping them open? Why keep those tabs open? I will write out the objective and process related to the open tabs. Once I’ve gone thru the process and achieved the objective, I can close those tabs without hesitation.
For example, if I were to have 6 tabs of article on uber as the future solution of logistics open, and the reason is that I want to learn about different views on uber’s possibility to get into logistics.
A good indicator that I’v e learned these views is that I can write an article that summarizes different views and lets them talk to each other. Writing the article will be my objective.
Thus, I will list out the process -
a. read 6 uber articles about logistics — 10 min * 6= 60 mins
b. summarize each article — 10 min * 6 = 60 mins
c. draw a diagram to see how the views are related to one another — 20 min
d. compile the summary and the relationship into one post — 30 min
After I’ve completed these things, I no longer need to refer to the 6 articles again. I’ve learned about the subject and achieved the objective. I can happily close my tabs.
Now after I apply project management techniques to reading and writing, there are only less than 5 open tabs on my browser.
When there are more than 1 topic, I would use spreadsheet to keep track of interested topics, deal with them one at a time. That’s how I make sure I won’t just be hoarding interested articles.
P.S. — Leisure reading is different from this. I’d just close them after reading them. If I pocket leisure reading, most likely I won’t read them again. Kinda like old magazines…