As someone who reboots periodically just to clear dozens of windows with a hundred tabs or more, can affirm that this is the modern bane of my work existence.
+1 to making this better. Please.
+1 to making this better. Please.
I would also like to understand how you get to that state in the first place. I see colleagues at work with so many tabs they don't know what is what all the time and they spend so much time trying to find the right tab it's unbelievable. They need to show something to us that requires switching between maybe two or three tabs and they always mess it up. Half the time in these meetings is spent on findings tabs and/or scrolling wildly within them.
Personally I have exactly 2 Windows open and I never get to more tabs than where I can still see from the tab title what is what. I also know what's where, meaning Gmail is open in the first tab of the first window, calendar in Tre second, timesheet in the third.
Second window has sprint board and monitors as first and following tabs and is generally used for 'work'. When unneeded work tabs get closed. For example if I review a PR, the tab stays open until I'm done with that PR and then it's closed.
Your situation might be completely different from theirs but your post reminded me of this. Can you explain how you get there and why?
O1: Reminders and Resumption
O2: Revisiting References
O3: Avoid Costly Re-finding
O4: Sunk Costs and Aspirations
O5: External Mental Model
O6: Uncertain RelevanceO1 sure I leave stuff open to remind me too. Like the PR I didn't finish reviewing. But once I'm done I close the tab.
O2/O3 I get that but I don't need a tab open. I use Firefox and no bookmarks. I just type what I remember to find something specific. Let's say I need to revisit a google doc about a certain topic. I'll type "docs <topic title part>" and most likely it'll be one of the top 3 results shown from my browsing history. I find _everything_ that way and I just don't get why I'd need to leave the tab open or sort things into bookmarks with categories and such.
O4 I am particularly talking about work so I wonder how this would play a role but who knows.
O5/O6 this seems largely to correspond to O1 if you ask me. I do sometimes find duplicate tabs open and close them or I find reminder tabs that I no longer need because something else reminded me of them but I did that task in a new tab, which is since closed. The point is that if I have only maybe 20 tabs total open it's easy to clean up. I would agree that having 500 open would just be overwhelming. Then again I'm known to go over our 'backlog' and just close 500 tickets in an hour long session because our product managers can't apparently keep the backlog at a reasonable size.
As an example I get that some people just have to categorize things. That's ok. But why then use these insanely nested bookmark folder trees to try and find stuff and failing? If it doesn't work, try something else.
I didn't figure out the current (as you say very specific) way of doing things overnight. It's a constantly evolving thing. I get that someone might not know for example that some of this is possible and thus can't bring themselves to close tabs for fear of not finding it again. Once you know though how powerful and easy the search is, is there just a psychological barrier some people can just never break through?
Can you provide any insight into that?
It ignores people have different needs too. You work with reasonably named Google docs. Other people work with reports with only different query strings. Or PDF data sheets with no titles and inscrutable names. Or they just have to juggle more tasks.
The person you replied to doesn't seem to worry about losing pages. And the paper implied people who keep tabs open don't use nested bookmark folders.
Your system is specific. But the methods aren't special. Consider others tried them and found them lacking before imagining they have psychological trouble.