Tabs
I have so many browser tabs open. Thirty-seven at this moment and I just did a mini-purge.
I think we all have highly personal online rules and routines. We don’t talk about these much.
Everyone I know has some implicit set of personal standards regarding email inbox management. How many items can stay there. How we feel when there’s too many. People have been figuring out how to cope with new levels of in-coming web content for over twenty years and for something so deeply embedded in everyday life it receives surprisingly little discussion.
I now see that browser tabs are my new equivalent of the unread books piled on my bedside table. Remember books? There is not one book on my bedside table. There used to be thirty.
I don’t shut down my PC. Browsers stay up. I think I might get to something important sometime so I keep the Tab open. It is not a good idea. It is a bogus form of in-box management that allows me to delete the email but not remove the content from my visual attention.
I do not regard email as a hassle or a seductive distraction. I pay for a service that sorts my email into total shit, stuff maybe worth looking at, and the real thing. An invisible service has been doing this for over five years so I’m not in some honeymoon period. It costs less than a tank of gas for year of background help I never think about.
I respond to in-coming real things very quickly. I let a few dozen items stay in my in-box as a master list of who I’m actively thinking about, not as a to-do list.
Apps like Slack and Discord have hijacked my attention from other social media. I check in on Facebook much less and Discord much more. Discord is where my primary online community has one of its homes. The other home is in VR.
Slack is where the people I am with in the so-called real world communicate, which makes it not just a source of connection but a functionally relevant channel.
This shift makes life easier in that Slack and Discord require no management. They do not accumulate. As I shift in this direction, I send less emails. But in my media communications world, there are still some types of messages I prefer to use email for, even with people I chat with regularly on Discord.
Tabs are sometimes just browser tabs but by staying open they keep something in me open too. If I do it by choice, I think it’s helpful. Periodically, I get tired of looking at all those Tabs pointing to cool content. Turns out I didn’t need any of them.
I need to close down Tabs right away when I feel like this. In fact, thirty-seven is still too many. I need to do more, a lot more.