Tab Zero
Many words have been written on processing your inbox to empty (called Inbox Zero for short). This is usually discussed in the context of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system. In case it's a new concept for you, here is the best resource on the subject, Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero. And to present a balanced picture, here is one of the best resources on the opposite idea, Mike Gunderloy's GMail for Inbox Infinity.
Inbox Zero is really a specific instantiation of a general concept of GTD, which is to have inboxes to collect everything inbound that needs your attention, and then process those inboxes to empty once or twice a day, getting everything out of the inbox and into its proper place (as an actionable to-do, delegated, into a reference file, or trashed) while touching everything only once.
So many of us end up using our email inbox as a (poorly functioning) to-do list that the email inbox has gotten the most attention, but there is another inbox that gets far less attention, and it has been vexing me for years. The browser tab.
At any given time I usually have 30+ browser tabs open on 2 computers for a total of 60+ tabs. Firefox crashes used to clear them out for me every week or so, but better stability in Firefox and automatic tab session saving means they never get cleared out now unless I make it happen.
Here is a snapshot of my Firefox windows at this moment:
Why so many? It's not that I'm lazy or messy. I'm a very hard worker and a bit of a neat freak. The problem, I now realize, is that I use tabs as a to-do list. There are tabs that are open because I'll need them when I get to a particular item on my to-do list, and there are tabs that represent something to do (or in some cases, just something to read) that is not otherwise on my to-do list.
So... you may still be saying, "Why have 60 tabs? Just put the item on your to-do list and shut the tab." I do that on occasion, but frankly, it's a big pain in the butt. Copying and pasting a bunch of web addresses into and out of the to-do list gets old quickly. It's just easier to keep the tabs open.
What's the downside with 60 tabs? Same as with email. I lose a ton of time touching each tab over and over again (some of these tabs stay open for weeks!) going back through the same tabs over and over again trying to find the one I want and to keep the number of open tabs down to a manageable 3 dozen. (Lots of open tabs also makes Firefox use lots of memory.)
I've struggled to think up anyway to make this better until it dawned on me, every email client worth a darn has picked up on this problem and now makes it easy to convert an email into a to-do. I need a browser/to-do list combination that makes it easy to convert a tab (or set of tabs) into a to-do and then to convert the to-do back into the tabs when I'm ready to do it. Either direction should be just 1 click.
Any suggestions? Does such a thing exist? Anyone found a different solution to achieving Tab Zero? Anyone want to take the idea and build it (feel free to take the idea and the name "Tab Zero" if you'd like)? Please. Unless there is already a solution I don't know about or someone grabs the idea and builds it, I'll probably end up trying to solve it myself.
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You could try the Tab Mix Plus add-on for Firefox. Its Session Manager feature can be used to save a group of tabs (and their histories) with a name and/or date to remind you what you wanted to do with those tabs.
I also used to wait for Firefox to crash to solve this problem for me.
But now I have a rule that if I haven't dealt with a tab in ~48 hours, it must not be important, so I close it.
If I do think I'll want to come back to it later, I bookmark it in Delicious before closing it.
These are good suggestions.
@Qrystal - I do use Tab Mix Plus and it's Session Manager, but so far only to further the problem! If I need to restart Firefox or my computer, I get nervous about losing all my precious tabs (it only sounds ridiculous when you write it down) so I save all my tabs with Session Manager because I don't fully trust Firefox's built in saving of the session (I guess you could say I backup my tabs, how ridiculous is that?). I'll look into using Tab Mix Plus better.
@Lucien - How do you know if the tab is older than 48 hours? I do now realize that not having a trusted way to archive bookmarks that I feel I can very quickly and reliably get back to them is a big part of my problem. I used to be a big del.icio.us user, but I hate trying to find anything with it. I've tried Evernote off and on... but it always seems a little slow and inefficient.
It was all so much easier when a Firefox crash could solve this for me, even though I'd curse the heavens each time. I guess it goes to show you have to be careful what you wish for.
-Sean
Bookmark organization is a PITA, for sure. I'm pretty organized, but am horrible at going back and reading the stuff I've bookmarked. I am trying to move more thoroughly over to Diigo because I love highlighting and sticky notes to remind me why I am coming back to a page. Unfortunately the bookmarklet I have to use in Google Chrome isn't quite as smooth to work with as the toolbar in Firefox (so if you decide to try it, get the toolbar!)
If annotated bookmarking is the answer to having too many tabs, maybe Diigo can help.
I also have come up with a simple little hack that seems to be working for me in Google Chrome: I have a bookmark toolbar folder I call "ToRead", and if I come across something I want to read but don't necessarily need it for something *today*, I just drop it in there and read it at my leisure. If it's worth keeping, I'll Diigo it and highlight my reasons or put a sticky note on it, but most of the time I'll just delete it when I'm done.
@Lucien Stals: There is a FF plugin that "ages" your tabs so you can easily see which are old.
Try Tab Kit as well. It can color code your tab groups to make it easier to sort through later. Bonus, you can close a group of tabs in 1 click.
For those do-it-later tabs. Try something like "Read it Later" which creates a list of all the pages you need to read later. Or taboo which saves a snapshot of that tab.
Tooo many options. I show my tabs vertically along the left side of my screen and my rule is when it fills the screen, I need to trip it down. :)
BTW. Line breaks/CRs aren't showing up in comments.
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j0dan,
Ya, Sean brought the issue up to my attention, and I issued a fix for it. Just needs to be pushed to server and all will be happy.
Check out the "Later" function on RSStalker.com - a bookmarklet to put any web page into your personal RSS feed.
I do use Instapaper's Read Later... which gives me an RSS feed and syncs read later pages to the iPhone. I like it... it covers the "this tab is open because I want to read it but don't have time problem."
My bigger problem remains in a no fuss but trusted/searchable bookmark reference system that I'll actually use and with the to-dos.
I was at 78 tabs this morning. 58 on 1 computer and 20 in the other. This is just insane so I decided to try to process them to Tab Zero and try some of the tools suggested here to help do that. While installing Tab Kit and Diijo and restarting Firefox I made a series of goofy user errors with the tab session saving that ended up wiping out both my explicit save (I thought I was loading it, but I was saving over top of it) and my auto-save (Diijo did a double restart so the 2nd start autosaved no tabs).
I was left with 27 tabs from my last saved session on Tuesday. Of those 27, I had since closed all but 5 or 6. So I lost about 70 tabs. I was actually depressed and distraught about this for about an hour this morning. I had just reviewed a few of the tabs before deciding to process them and I got excited about what some of them contained, so I know there was some good stuff in there. I'm getting over it... but I'm not to the stage where I'm happy it happened yet.
So here I sit, with just this 1 tab (and the 20 on the other computer). A version of the old solution (Firefox crash) worked again.
I'm going to post a mockup of what a good solution might look like and summarize some of your suggestions.
A side purpose of this comment is to test Eric's line break fix. Do we have paragraphs here? I'll know when I submit.
-Sean
Thanks Mayson! I decided RSStalker.com's Save for Later is better than InstaPaper's Read Later (which I've been using for a long time). I switched over. It's simpler (no logins!) and I can just use the excellent iPhone interface of Google Reader to read the RSS feed. I don't really want the fuss of a separate iPhone application that syncs.
-Sean
Hey, has Firefox improved their History records much yet? I remember being frustrated with losing / closing / forgetting stuff I had open, and getting even more frustrated by their history.
Interestingly, Google Chrome keeps history quite well. That is, if you're not worried that They're tracking everything you see or do... ;)
This whole situation relates strongly to the fact that there is way too much Out There to possibly read in a lifetime. Books, blogs, advice, news, friends' lives .... how do you draw the line? It's basically an existential question: do we want to READ about stuff, or actually DO stuff?
@Qrystal I think the history in Firefox has improved quite a bit at this point. I do worry more about using a browser from Google, given their propensity for collecting data to target advertising. I suspect Skynet (from the Terminator mythology) will come out of work done at Google.
You are right to point out the link between this struggle with tabs and the struggle between the number of great books and time to read them. You are even more right to point out that a bigger challenge than deciding what to read with your precious time is to decide on the time you'll spend reading and doing other stuff. I am drawn to time management because of it being an existential question at its core.
Had Camus and Sartre been knowledge workers in present day Western culture they would have couched their most famous examples of existential angst in terms of time management rather than acts and omissions in WWII.
-Sean
my tabs aren't directly tied to tasks, for the most part, but when I see something that I want to read but don't have time right then, I add it to delicious. I guess I could tag them so I would know to review them once a day, etc.
@normd Does that work? Do you go back and read them? Or are you saying it's just a tactic to put your mind at rest that you could go back and read them if you really needed to?
I'm going to have a blog follow up on this topic soon that summarizes everyone's suggestions and shows a mockup of a tool that I think might help solve the problem.
I'm not doing super hot with this right now. Current tab count as of this moment: ~60
Thanks,
Sean
I second the use of "Read It Later" Firefox extension.
My have probably a bazillion bookmarks, so there is no point putting anything really important there. I use a somewhat primitive method for webpages that I actually NEED to do something with (generally for work purposes) - I email the link to myself and flag it in Outlook to turn it into a task. At least this way, all tasks are in one place. Inelegant but effective.