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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Crap, I still have a tab open in my browser at home for the best things and stuff of 2013[1] that I haven't made it though, and I first opened it when it was posted in late 2013! I really need to devote some time to that, since I've bothered to make sure that tab survived for two years.

1: http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of...

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I've been there myself, but it's really mentally freeing to just let go of the tabs.

If you have something open because you need to finish a task... Put the task explicitly on your todo list, set a reminder, and close the tab.

If you have something open that you are need to finish reading reading but don't immediately have the time? Add it to your Pocket or alternative, and close the tab. If you feel you might forget it, set a calendar reminder to follow-up.

If you have something open that you think might just be nice to reference for that project you're kinda tinkering on... Summarize your finding in a way that would be meaningful to a future-you searching for that reference. You can do this in whatever method you prefer (bookmark, txt file, journal, pocket, etc.) And finally, close the tab!

In my personal experience having tabs open for weeks, to years on end did nothing more than exacerbate my anxiety over the fear of somehow missing out or loosing that information.

Give your working brain a rest and externalize this effort onto something that you aren't constantly being reminded of every second you're using the browser.

If you're worried about not finishing something, give yourself deadlines and set reminders.

If you're worried about not finding something, make it easier for a future-you to find it.

If you just want to get all the tabs out of your face but be able to find them later, try OneTab. https://www.one-tab.com/

In Opera, you can right click on any tab in the tab menu, and click 'save tabs as speed dial folder'. All open tabs will be saved in a folder on your speed dial. If you wan to open them again, you can right-click the speed dial folder and select to open them all at once.

Why not just use Chrome's built-in feature to save all your open tabs as bookmarks?

Or even save all your open tabs as a MAFF archive! Then you can read them offline. I like to add them to my todo list and then read them when I turn of my networking so I don't get lost down a hacker news rat hole. Dunno if chrome supports that, but Firefox (obviously) does[0].

[0]: http://maf.mozdev.org/

I'm just going to open that in a new tab and save it for later... d'oh!

That was my old approach, but it quickly leads to a very cluttered folder full of dozens of "New folder" folders, and personally I never look back at any of them because it feels like a junk drawer.

OneTab's features for organizing and prioritizing are so much better when you're dealing with hundreds/thousands of tabs. Also you can browse by the date a tab group was added on.

I used to do that and it started to really stress me out! Get into Pocket or Workflowy or something else to sort those for later!

I started using Pocket a few months ago and really enjoy it. The offline reading is great for public transit, and it gives me a good backlog of articles that I want to read. I do find it hard to keep my rate of finished/incoming above 1 with all the other things I try to make some time for!

Oh my finished/incoming ratio is disgusting. I imagine that if it was important to save at one point, it will remain important in the future when I figure out a way to pipe them all into some AI summarizer and it can teach it to me.

I've been collecting for a number of years now, and interestingly, when I sort oldest to newest, I have a really interesting window into what I thought was important/newsworthy at that time and what I know to be important/newsworthy or timeless now. I wonder if I can use that information to help sharpen my own judgment?

I'd love (well... hate) a Chrome plugin that maintains a personal leaderboard for longest-lived tabs.

You haven't had to reboot your home computer for 2 years? Nice!

In Chrome (probably the others too) you can set it to keep the open tabs open across restarts.

You're getting a lot of suggestions about how to ensure that you'll read the content eventually, but I'd like to offer the suggestion that you shouldn't read it at all. I can't speak to how busy you are, but if you can't make the time in two years, that says to me that this is something you really don't want to do at all.

OneTab Chrome extension: Spares your RAM, but still lets you maintain all your Tab-anxiety!

Another alternative: the great suspender

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