Tag Archives: tabs

Productivity Hack: Fight The Tab

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Must resist tab!

Must resist tab!

One of the best things about modern browsers, the tab, is also the most destructive to my productivity.1 While I wouldn’t want to give up my tabs, I’ve found an awesome productivity hack to help me manage them.

1. The Problem

In short: cognitive clutter.  Visiting Twitter, a favorite blog, or some RSS feeds I’ll end up accumulating tabs in my web browser.  These tend to be things I know I may want to come back to later, but wasn’t ready to commit to bookmarking.

The problem with bookmarking a website is that either you have to spend a lot of time curating your bookmarks (into folders or hierarchies  or you just bookmark things willy-nilly.  What I needed was a way to save things I knew I wasn’t going to visit all the time – but which I might want to see again some day.  Since I was pretty sure I didn’t need a bookmark of these tabs, I would just leave them open (I’ll get to them some day and then close the tab).

Those open tabs created what I’m going to term cognitive clutter.  Whenever I looked at the top of the browser, all I saw were a line of icons – things I felt like I needed to read or do.2

I’m pretty sure this is exactly why Evernote has a business model – people want to save the things they see or think in a searchable fashion.

2. The Solution

The answer was e-mail.  While I don’t need MORE e-mail, my e-mail is already a repository for information that I want to keep because I may some day need or want to look back on it, but not a place where I went to refer to something all the time.

Now I send myself an e-mail with the subject “bookmarks” and then dump any links I’m not going to get to immediately and don’t warrant a bookmark.  To find something that I once saw, all I need to do is search for an e-mail with “bookmarks” in the subject line, from me, and then perhaps a word about the thing I’m trying to remember.

Really, I use this same system for a lot of other things as well.  I e-mail myself “todo” lists, “song” lists, and other lists.  Things I don’t need to remember, but don’t want to forget forever.

Anyhow, I hope this has been of some use to you.  :)

  1. Photo courtesy of Bill Selak [↩]
  2. And, really, cognitive clutter sounds SO much better than “digital hoarder” [↩]

Windows and Tabs

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My FireFox tabs were getting out of control.  I had about 50 tabs all stacked up and I couldn’t really quite keep them all straight.

Why so many?  I had about a dozen tabs for things like Gmail, Twitter, a few random sites/blog posts I’d been meaning to read/scan, two YouTube videos I wanted to watch, and a few things I wanted to blog here.  Another dozen tabs were devoted to things related to a business/blog/website – images I wanted to use in posts, post drafts, etc.  And, about two dozen consisted of awesome stuff in Thingiverse and around the web I wanted to blog over at MakerBot.

For someone who gets easily1 distracted like myself, having so many tabs across so many different topics makes it very easy for me to get sidetracked.  It occurred to me that I could just open up a few FireFox windows and drag and drop my mess of tabs into three broad categories.  I opened up two additional windows, which makes one for MakerBot blog post drafts, business/blog post drafts, and a third for miscellaneous stuff. 2

So far I’ve been able to clear out a bunch of tabs – which feels great.  One interesting and satisfying side effect is that when you close the last tab in a FireFox window, the window closes!

  1. Ohh!  Shiny! [↩]
  2. Like this post! [↩]

Sanding

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This part is probably unnecessary.  I’m not sanding down the surface of the wood parts because it is so thin the veneer would probably come right off.

However, there are some small tabs throughout the pieces where they were once attached to larger parts.  I’d rather do it now than after painting and then have to paint the sanded parts over again.