You gotta lotta tabs
Clear some space / Issue 1,157
Oh, hi friends!
What to do about all the tabs?
I realized a few years ago that I could either click through a bunch of browser tabs every day, or I could try to make things.
That seems dramatic.
But it is dramatic.
Making time for meaningful work is serious business.
And staring at that New Yorker article and that intriguing newsletter and that media gossip and that new launch and those tweets and your 16 Google Docs titled Untitled and your email and Slack and why is your email open in another tab and Discord and all the rest…
In the words of Sondheim, these distractions are a “hole in the world like a great black pit and the vermin of the world inhabit it.”
Extreme, but you understand what I mean! Right?
We cannot let content dictate our days.
Copy the URLs of things you might want to read one day into a Note, or a doc, or Pocket.
Then close them. All of them. Get ‘em out of your sight and out of your brain.
You will not miss what’s not in front of you.
Keep up your project work, your communication tools, the ones you absolutely need.
But then focus on one thing, one tab at a time.
Even if it’s just for an hour.
You create your boundaries.
You dictate your days.
Can highly recommend OneTab. It's a browser extension that makes it easy to save the open tabs into one tab (hence the name) and access them at a later point.
I struggle with this SO HARD. I want to read all the things! All the time! I've found that Chrome's reading list can be helpful, though I now stress about how many unread articles I've saved to it...Same with all of the Substacks I subscribe to. I file them away in a separate email folder and go back to read them when I can, but that unread badge just haunts me. But this is a good reminder. So thank you.