The great thing about covering productivity as a writer is that people will start pointing out new and better tools to you. The not so great thing is that, often, these tools turn out to be neither new nor better. But every once in a while, something truly different comes along.
My last ‘once in a while’ happened two weeks ago. The tool is called Workona. You can think of it as an operating system for Google Chrome.
It groups your tabs into workspaces, allows you to store and move them around, and at the same time makes switching seamless without cluttering your desktop with windows. It’s great. Except for one thing: It made me less productive, not more.
How come?
The Anatomy Of Anxious Browsing
One of my big time savers while browsing is grouping tabs in separate windows. Everything related to a new article goes into one window, background music into another, email into a third one, and so on.
It’s not just a way of sorting tabs by task, but by state of mind. When I go into the music window, I know a few relaxed minutes will follow. The email window is one of…