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Why it’s a good idea to keep tabs on your tabs…
An interesting article in Fast Company, “The twisted psychology of browser tabs-and why we can’t get rid of them”, discusses many people’s habit of keeping too many tabs open in their browsers, reflecting poor organization and a drain on their machines’ memory resources. As a teacher who has the opportunity to frequently peek into the computers of his students, I know that the misuse of browser tabs, what the article calls “tab hoarding” (akin to what would be the Diogenes syndrome in the physical world :-) is a widespread problem.
Why do we keep tabs open? Because we think it contains information we may need, and that closing it means losing that information. On many occasions, this feeling is compounded by, for example, procrastination that lead us to think that later we will find time to read the contents of a tab, or by tasks that we put off for whatever reason, sometimes leaving us with several dozen. If we also use multiple browsers or multiple open windows, the problem is magnified, and we can end up with an unmanageable number of open tabs.
Routinely keeping too many tabs open in the browser is a bad habit, and above all, it is inefficient, even if it seems perfectly normal. Most articles I’ve read on the subject encourage abandoning the routine use of browser tabs at all, as a way to improve productivity. And yet, after many…
