Why It’s a Good Idea To Keep Tabs on Your Tabs…

An interesting article in Fast Company, “The twisted psychology of browser tabs-and why we can’t get rid of them”, discusses many people’s habit of keeping too many tabs open in their browsers, reflecting poor organization and a drain on their machines’ memory resources. As a teacher who has the opportunity to frequently peek into the computers of his students, I know that the misuse of browser tabs, what the article calls “tab hoarding” (akin to what would be the Diogenes syndrome in the physical world 🙂 is a widespread problem.

Why do we keep tabs open? Because we think it contains information we may need, and that closing it means losing that information. On many occasions, this feeling is compounded by, for example, procrastination that lead us to think that later we will find time to read the contents of a tab, or by tasks that we put off for whatever reason, sometimes leaving us with several dozen. If we also use multiple browsers or multiple open windows, the problem is magnified, and we can end up with an unmanageable number of open tabs.

Routinely keeping too many tabs open in the browser is a bad habit, and above all, it is inefficient, even if it seems perfectly normal. Most articles I’ve read on the subject encourage abandoning the routine use of browser tabs at all, as a way to improve productivity. And yet, after many years of experience and perhaps because I am borderline obsessive-compulsive, I’ve never had any problems in this area, so I’m going to share, in case anyone has any use for them, some of the basic rules I use to avoid tab overcrowding and my best practices for efficient web use:

1. The place for a piece of information we may need later and don’t want to lose is not a tab: it’s a repository. Mine is Refind, which also adds an amazing algorithmic recommendation feature that I love and have talked about on other occasions, but there are many more: Pocket, Evernote, Pinboard, Pinterest,, etc. If you often save tabs and install a button for one of these repositories in your browser, you will immediately see that the alternative of using its search function is far superior to searching through dozens of tabs to find the one you wanted to retrieve.
2. Only keep the tabs open you really need to hand: I keep seven tabs open at all times, and I set them. In my case they are pages like Feedly, Analytics, my own page, my WordPress page, Gmail, Calendar and Twitter, but that, logically, will vary a lot from user to user. Pinned tabs are never closed, and you tend not to need them much.
3. Use browser tabs as “project managers”. An open tab is to be read immediately or should be moved to your online repository, but if I work with a series of tabs that correspond to the same project if I move it to the repository, it would be mixed up with many others), and I am going to close that project in a day or two at most, I open a new window, move those tabs to it and minimize it. This is what I do, for example, when I am documenting links for an article that I have not yet started to write. But that situation should only last a day or two until I finish that project, and seeing more than one window open in the browser overwhelms me, so I try to close it as soon as I can.
4. If a tab is not permanent (and therefore pinned), is not part of a project (which would be in another window and minimized), and you are not reading or using it at the time, it makes no sense for it to be open and consuming memory. Move it to your repository, close it, and you can retrieve it when you need it. You can already make the classifications, groupings or tags you want, and you should have an internal search engine that allows you to find it when you need it. If you end up storing thousands of things, don’t worry: that’s what it’s there for: mine has all the articles I have found interesting over many, many years. Once you know this, leaving tabs open that you are not using right now or are going to use soon makes no sense.
5. Bookmarks: forget them. At most, five or six that you use routinely, and that you can view in the bookmarks bar, so that they appear only when you open a new tab. Keeping the bookmarks bar open all the time simply uses up screen space, and having a bunch of windows in bookmarks is another way of showing that you haven’t understood what a store is for. Actually, bookmarks shouldn’t even be necessary: if you manage them well, every time you type their first letter, the browser should automatically find their full address. If not, there is no point in having that page in favorites, so off to the repository it goes.

Our computers tend to have much more memory than we usually need for most tasks, but it still makes sense to treat it as a scarce resource. Even if it’s not necessary, I tend to close everything I’m not using every so often, both on my computer and on my smartphone, and even though some device manufacturers say it’s not necessary to do so, I think it’s a good practice.

When it comes to memory and browser tabs: less is more.

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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans.

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