A chaotic person. That description fits me perfectly. Set aside if it’s a good thing or not, you need to get used to the way you are. You need to learn how to live with yourself. Ranging from little things you do to your “future yourself” (such as putting a glass of water next to your bed when going to sleep drunk) to creating complex schemes to keep yourself sane (one of the best ones I’ve seen). Sometimes tools are needed.
The researcher
Whenever I try to look for information I open a new tab. I never close the one that I used. I keep tabs open with articles I want to read later. At the moment—writing this article—it looks like this:
I can’t even see the names of the tabs. That wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I can tell what they are by the thumbnails (who can name all of them will get something, like a signed sushi roll). But they also eat up quite a lot of the computer’s memory. And that means slow. I hate computers being slow.
Seventy-nine percent of the memory taken by an internet browser only. That’s not good. Chrome has a good reason for it (ever restored a crashed browser?) but still it takes too much. There must be a better way to navigate through that amount of information. We’ll need to use some more apps.
The reading
First of all, let’s get rid of all the articles I want to read later. I don’t need to keep them open, I just need the links noted down and open them whenever I have time. I’m using Pocket to do that for me, but use whatever you want, you can even write the links down on a piece of paper if it’s your thang.
The idle tabs
Tabs with webpages I’m not using at the moment. Hmm, I could learn closing them but that would be too much work for a lazy person. Luckily there’s something that can do that for me. A Chrome add-on called OneTab. It’s absolutely magical. One click and all of my tabs are gone. How?
- It copies a link of all the webpages open
- Creates a super simple webpage with only the links
- This one tab doesn’t eat almost any memory
- When you need the page, click on the link and it opens right where you left it
I do this on average every hour to make sure I don’t continue the whole day with that brazillion tabs open.
The rest
You will probably end up with a couple of tabs always open anyway. Myself I keep the Facebook and both of my emails (personal and work) open all of the time in case anyone needs a swift answer. These my computer can take.
