Close that tab | Guest Article by Pious Saraswat

How many browser tabs do you have open right now?

My safe guess is that it’s many many more than you actually need.

I currently have a YouTube video, a shopping site, three articles on Trump, two presentations I’m working on and a lot of other stuff in between. Web browser tabs serve as the default to-do list, helping us procrastinate on every task, knowing that it’s open and that we can come back to it later.
Suddenly, we’ve reached the stage where we can’t see the tab icons anymore, and have tabs open from two week ago that we haven’t dealt with yet.

Sound familiar?

Multitasking is one of the great evils of modern productivity and the count of open browser tabs is one of it’s most visible signs.

The more tabs you have open, the more multitasking work you’re doing, and the less likely you are to be completing things. Instead of finishing one single task and moving to the next, we hop between tasks: completing a few steps of each, and then moving to the next. With each open task we increase the cognitive load on our brains, increasing stress, and deny ourselves the pleasure of finished tasks.

Install this Chrome Extension. Close all your open Chrome tabs. Set the limit to three tabs, pick one task, and force yourself to complete whatever you are doing now. Then finish the next thing.