- open link, determine if it’s relevant or not. If it’s relevant, but not relevant right now, I’ll dump it into my notes.
- then I close the tab. Pretty simple.
- when the time comes where that link is relevant again, I’ll find it in my notes and open it.
- I really don’t find any value in having tabs open that aren’t immediately relevant to what I’m doing. 10 seems like the upper limit of focus for me.
It's clear that you do understand the value of preserving tabs that aren't immediately relevant to what you're doing. What's the difference in value between writing tabs in your notes and simply not closing them?
I'd understand if there weren't tree-style tabs - you can organize things better in your notes. There are tree-style tabs, though, so you can organize your tabs as you need them, and dropping into a root node is just like dropping into an old thought process.
Seriously, though, it's just a different way of working. If I want to save a link because I'm genuinely going to need it later, I save the link. More often than not, it just goes in the drafts or annotations for the article that I'm working on at that moment. If not, I save it in GoodLinks, where I get a title and a summary and tagging and syncing across my laptop and desktop and iPad.
I get that I'm an anomaly these days, and that "if you have less than 50 tabs open across three windows you're an amateur" is the norm among technonerds. (That is an actual quote from a friend.) But I am pretty sure the Venn diagram of the all-the-tabs-all-the-time folks I know and the "which tab is it? nope, nope, nope, I'm sure it's here somewhere" folks I know is essentially a perfect circle.
Well, one is indexed, searchable, tagged, and available whenever and wherever I want.
The other is ephemeral and maybe, hopefully I can find it and maybe hopefully I didn’t close it out, and maybe hopefully I remember the name so I can find it in my search history.
Managing tabs with useful info instead of writing them down sounds like a living nightmare.
Tabs are like a TODO list. If something needs to have attention paid to it, and then dismissed, I open a tab for it.
(Of course, I use Firefox & Tree Style Tabs. I find Chrome almost unusable due to its tabbing idiom.)
I’d never be able to use Tabs as todos because I personally use tabs very ephemerally. Closing out of chrome with 3 profiles and 10 tabs each open is nothing to me because I don’t care what tabs are open. If they’re important links then I’ve already written them down in Roam and/or bookmarked them.
question - how do you find anything? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never used tree tabs, but finding the link you used last week or last month to complete a task sounds like a nightmare without bookmarking it. Contrast this with my workflow, which doesn’t rely on tabs, and I can easily find it in my notes in less than 10 seconds.
When returning to the task, I just focus the window and instantly have a picture of my previous progression. In case of a computer crash or restart, it's been years since the Firefox session restore function ever failed me. That step in booting up the computer is quite painful though, the browser can take a good 60 seconds to restore the previous session.
When I'm done with a task for good, I just close the window. Workspaces help in keeping my Taskbar and Alt+Tab workflow clean as well. I often have 1000+ tabs "open".
With a work perspective in mind I have one window set up per task, I use tree style tabs on Firefox, and at a glance I can see the complete context of a task I’m researching, just from the decision tree the tab branches show. Every potentially interesting link that’ll help me with my task gets opened on a branch below the parent, then reviewed and filtered. This is tremendously useful when it comes to writing up documentation or updating tickets and the like.