One tab policy

I spend a lot of time on the internet and you probably do too. But while you can afford to disconnect and just get the work done, being online is a big part of my job as a professional writer. It may sound cool to make a living by virtually spending the whole day on the internet and writing about stuff. It is not.

Being the productivity black-hole it is, the internet is getting better at holding my easily impressed attention hostage for a long time. What used to take few minutes of concentrated hard work, now extends over hours of repeatedly interrupted, distracted work. Quality suffered badly, too.

Spending time site-hopping presented itself visually on the form of way too many tabs being opened over every work session. It all starts with a “let’s check HN for just 5 minutes” ©, which invariably turns into a tab frenzy of things “I’ll check later.”

These tabs lurking from over my browser never quit trying to bring me to check them over. And I seldom resist.

Hence the One Tab Policy.

From today on, my internet policy would be to allow one tab at a time whenever there’s no real need for multi-tabbing. While this sounds like a tiny change, it is not. And for the few hours I spent under the new rules I noticed that my productivity peaked and was able to finish more tasks than since a long time ago.

The beauty of this new* productivity trick? It needs no added software and frees RAM for more useful stuff.

What do you think about this dear strangers from the internet? Please leave me your thoughts and tricks! Thanks in advance.

*: As far as I’m aware of.