Tab anxiety

01/19/2023

A few weeks ago, my colleague was presenting the project and shared her screen. And then she asked if anybody had “tab anxiety” because she had so many opened tabs. It was kind of a joke, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my own and others’ relationships with the browser’s tabs.

Tabs in browsers were invented almost the same time as the browser itself appeared – in the early 1990s. And since then, many people don’t know how to manage their tabs.

Why do I have so many opened tabs? What to do with interesting articles I would like to read but don’t have any time right now? Should you keep any tabs pinned? How many tabs do I need right now, and how easy is it to find the website I opened a few days ago?

I don’t have answers to all of these questions. But I have found a great solution that helps me work with tabs.

I just never collect them.

Literally, I close all tabs and exit my browser every day so that I will start from scratch the next day. The same approach I use on my iPhone.

My cat doesn't give a fuck about tab anxiety. So do I.

If I find any interesting article or a blog post I want to read, I save it to Pocket and check it when I have free time (usually while commuting or on an average Saturday morning). If I want to remember the service I am going to use or already frequently using, I save the URL as a bookmark. If I find something inspiring that I can use in my future work, I keep it in Notion.

Yes, sometimes I work on something complicated or need to do research. In this case, right after I finish, I click the cross icon tens of times until I clear my browser’s tabs panel. And that's it.

Such an approach helps me keep my browser (and my mind!) clean to concentrate on my work. And I never get bothered by all these hundreds of thousands of opened tabs.