Clear Your Browser Tabs, Clear Your Mind

One habit that has helped me be more productive is closing all my browser tabs before finishing up for the day.

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

Each tab represents a task. By the end of the day, all of the open tabs should be dealt with. They should be either:

• Closed without further action. Think Facebook, Twitter, News Articles, Sales Dashboards etc.
• Delegated if you have a team and not a good use of your time but needs to be done
• Added to your to do list to be dealt with later. These are things that need to get done and you didn’t get a chance to finish them during the day. For example, submitting a claim form, writing up an UpWork job post, reading a how to tutorial. These can be sorted according to importance and urgency, and you can decide whether they should go on the next day’s to do list or a different deadline. I recommend Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog for more on this.
• Added to a reference list. This list can sometimes be confused with the to do list. If I come across an article about nice places to eat in Paris and know that I’ll refer back to it later, then this belongs to a reference list that might be called “Cool Places to Eat in Paris” and it’ll just have a bunch of links so that I can easily add more links to it later. You can do this on Evernote, Apple Notes, etc. If I’m going to Paris…