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STRAVID - Building software collectively.
Not long ago I had a problem: 2 Google Chrome windows, each containing 40+ open tabs.
I used tabs the wrong way. When I visited sites like Hacker News I would open every interesting looking link in a new tab. Starting with the first tab this routine would continue while I read article after article.
Most web pages would be kept open in a tab after reading because I told myself I would later read it again, take notes or need it for a specific project. Once in a while my bad conscience would kick in and I would keep all unread tabs open for later while I did my work.
Like that I generated my gigantic collection of tabs.
First of all they slow down your browser and operating system making whatever you do a misery. The habit of opening everything in a tab and “saving” it for later frees you from a very important decision: The decision to distinguish between valuable and irrelevant content!
Without this conscious separation you will waste your crucial time with reading rubbish articles and leaving good ones behind. And because you still want to read the good ones you will start to procrastinate your work.
If you see yourself in the above written you must understand that the tab count won’t decrease, there will be always a next tab to open for later! So you have to change your surfing routine and get used to the fact that you can’t read every single article on the Internet.
Some simple guidelines for browsing:
To help you not to exceed your personal limit of open tabs there is a little Google Chrome extension called No More Tabs. You can set the maximum of open tabs and if you open tab #(maximum + 1) No More Tabs will close the oldest tab to teach you not to open too many tabs.
At the moment I’m at a 10 tabs limit, and will try to decrease it to 5 over the next weeks. Once I can live with that I will remove the No More Tabs extension to get back my pure Google Chrome baby.
And now close all tabs and enjoy a clean start in your new browsing experience without a cluttered browser!
The Bits and Bytes will thank you!
You have questions, ideas or feedback? I like to hear from you and I'm looking forward to exhange thoughts. Please send an email to david@strauss.io and say “Hello”.