Why do you have 42 tabs open in your browser right now?
A lack of tooling would be the obvious answer, but really you have searched long enough a...
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Brilliant! I really enjoy reading it!
Currently, I have 9 tabs open. I do use Obsidian and Notion for keeping My Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) or track reading list, learning resources, writing resources...
Nice article, I know from 99% of people I work with this a very common problem. But for me I get antsy when I have more than 5 tabs open. I usually have max 2 tabs for work + 1 for music. And I refuse to move on to another tab until I've completed the current one. If only I was this organised in real life π
So much truth in that article. I'm probably at ~400 tabs spread into 7 tab groups!
The thing that works best for me is to finish the week by closing tabs!
My other issue is that i browse using middle click keeping track of where I'm coming. Strangely enough browser has a great feature for that => history!
I'm actually getting stressed out about that idea
Thanks for the article, i think I'll try to apply some of them quickly, my issue is getting worse lately.
Good luck and try to those kind of changes one step at a time. It took me one month I think. Changing deeply engrained habits doesn't happen instantly by sheer will
This so (SO!) right... But I never got the discipline to keep up with this clean way of organisation. Worst, each time I started using an "elsewhere" tool, I spent hours learning it, only to find another, better alternative two months after...
So I basically admitted to myself I would be a tab junkie for the rest of my life and started using vivaldi.com/, which provides better tab management: vertical tabs, search, reading list, etc. Brave is also implementing vertical tabs in their nightly. Edge supports it as well. So for the weak people like me, try vertical tabs, it really alleviates part of the pain!
Glad you like it!
I didn't have the discipline either so I started small.
My recommandation today would be to start with just the reading list.
It made a big positive impact in the way I consume the internet.
You can use which ever tool you like, but if you are prone to instead of benchmarking 42 possible tools, I highly recommend checkvist.com/ which is the one I use in the screenshot.
Nice article! May I suggest:
Workona chrome (v8) plugin for tabs and real-time personal or team project and knowledge management and sharing plugin:
Workona Features
Workona Data Organization
(Multiples of all levels and items below, except where noted)
Effective Tab Management with Workona
The key to effective tab management in Workona that eventually discovered is to open and move tabs around to appropriate workspaces by concept however you desire. When you have finished reading or wish to reference a tab later, save it as a browser bookmark and/or save it as a resource in an appropriately named resource section in the current and optionally other workspaces. Once saved as a resource, the link is always there, so you can close the tab.
Keep a Clean Workspace
When your research session for the work period or day is done, and you've deposited important tabs as resources, you can close all tabs by clicking the Close All button in the Tabs Menu of the current workspace. You can reopen single resource tabs or reopen all tabs in a resource section by clicking Open All in the resource section menu.
Restore Workspace to Previous State
If you accidentally close tabs or they happen to disappear after a browser restart (only happened to me once), you can return any workspace to a previous state in the history of tab changes in that workspace by browsing the workspace's history via the Restore Tabs function in the workspace menu.
Saving to and Restoring from Archive
When you are finished with a workspace, you can either delete it or move it to the Archive. Workspaces that are archived can be restored at any time; naturally, deleted workspaces are unrecoverable.
Special Usage Notes for Workona on Android
On Android, you navigate your browser to the Workona website and log in. All of your workspaces and contents will show. However, if you attempt to click on the Tabs section of a workspace, Workona pops up a message instructing you to install the additional Workona Tabs Manager plugin. Just simply dismiss that message, because if you click the available "ADD TO CHROME" button, it will simply trigger the plugin to be added to your default DESKTOP chrome-based browser. Again, dismiss ("CANCEL") the message.
Other than not having access to a workspace's open tabs list, you can navigate and perform all other Workona functions, including creating any section or item, and opening tabs from the Resources section. That is one of the reasons why it's a good idea to save important tabs as resources - it's the only way to open your Workona tabs on Android. Conveniently, Workona opens resource links as group tabs, so all of your Workona-sourced tabs stay nicely associated. If you desire to save new tab research to Workona on Android, just copy and add the URL as a resource.
My preference, working with the Brave browser on desktop and Android, is to quickly save new research tabs to Brave's Reading List (sync'd across devices) by tapping "Add to reading list" in the browser menu. then later on desktop, open the research tabs from the reading list and deposit them in appropriate workspace resource sections.
My Workona Experience
In my research for my current project, conducted over the past six months using Workona, I effectively have hundreds to over a thousand pages nicely organized and annotated with notes, images, attachments, tasks, arbitrary tags, and other resources, easily searchable with full-text Universal Search, and easily shareable with and maintained by my team or anyone I wish to collaborate with.
My tablet and phone are Android-based, so the limitation mentioned above regarding the Android app not yet available, applies to my usage.
I use Workona as my "current project" focus tool. Though Workona is completely capable of replacing/supplanting browser bookmarks, I still save what I consider long-term or critical planning URLs as browser bookmarks. Just now, I chuckled, asking myself "Why?" Mmm... habit I guess, and maybe fear of losing a critical tab. Come to think of it... a glimpse of Workona's Settings panel, with the "Export Data" section visible:
Workona: Very efficient. Very effective. EXTREMELY helpful.
And, no, I have no affiliation with the company; just a happy, more organized user.
(Haha... I suppose I should go ahead and make this a post.)
nice article
This was such a fun read. π
And I love how ya included the questions in the end. Feeling inspired to go clean up my tabs, haha! π§Ή
Er... 780. I think I might need help :-)
For real you have 780 open tags?:O
Spread through 48 titled windows with tab groups. Mostly performing the role of a bookmark stack / dequeue. I'll clean up over Christmas :-)
You DEFINITELY need Workona. π I was JUST LIKE you before discovering Workona. Changed my life. See my comment on this article.
Did everyone forget about bookmarks and bookmark folders?
Haha... great question! As @jmfayard suggests, if you're not good at organizing your thoughts and resources hierarchically, bookmarks and bookmark folders will be of little help. I personally happen to be one of those who does organize thoughts and resources hierarchically very well. Still, I find it very helpful to supplement the bookmark paradigm with tags and other metadata. I've found a great tool for this is Workona (see my extended response here to this post suggesting Workona). It's great for organizing tabs into workspaces, which allow for adding notes, tasks, and other resources alongside said tabs. While Workona doesn't directly support tags, it has full-text search across your entire Workona knowledgebase, which allows you to use any or multiple tag designations of choice for adhoc inline tagging. I prefer the common #tag format, and occasion use !# for important references, then searching for #tag generally, or !#tag when I only want important references returned. I only press this again here because I find Workona so very useful and think others will as well.
Not Bob
The core problem is that we have to maintain a mental mapping of the thing we need (an interface, a website, a program, an application) to how to bring that thing up so we can use it(80% of these being websites, that either has to be remembered, or found in a sea of tabs, or looked up in yet another list of bookmarks, all the while having to content that there are still other interfaces running on the computer itself, with yet some of those buried underneath menu navigation sessions). I've managed to solve this problem using Keyboard Maestro whereby the only thing I need to remember is the name I've assigned to it, at which I just start typing its name until it unambiguously resolves, and I let Keyboard Maestro go fetch the interface for me. Its on my to blog list.
keyboardmaestro.com looks interesting.
But really it boils down to two solutions:
Here I'm exploring the second option.
Some of these never really worked out for me, I guess I just not organized enough to constantly copy over URLs to external apps. Most frequent issue is when I researching some topic and have many tabs open for it. Recent versions of Chrome has Tab groups, and Safari has it as well. It certainly helps keeping these βbrowsing workspacesβ isolated. What also worked out really well for me as a replacement of reading list is Tab snooze Chrome extension. I really like snoozing tabs for later time. With reading list I tend to just never follow up and actually read.
I used at some point an extension that automatically closes the tabs when I have more than X opened tabs by closing the last visited tab. Turns out, I didn't notice it because when I have too many tabs, I stop using them anyway...
I should reinstall this extension... It's here: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/a...
I am so confused π€£
Why?
Switch to Safari and use "tab groups", issue solved. Like I have a tab group for every project OR task I work on so it's much more organized.
Everyone is responding that his favorite tool solves the issue. If that's true why do people come up with new tabs tools all the time?