Friday, August 24, 2012

Tab Overload

I'm a huge fan of tabbed browsing. It's the only way I can keep up with the multitude of people and topics vying for my attention. I can't imagine ever browsing without it. Though, I suppose the 30+ second load times for a single page with dial-up had a lot to do with it. But I've learned that there's such a thing as too many tabs, and Chrome has a good way of telling me when I've reached that magic number:




Chrome certainly lets me indulge my tab addiction, finally unable to display text (icon only) at 21 tabs and at 42 can't even display icons anymore (@ 1280x1024). More and more research has shown multitasking decreases overall productivity. I find that's especially true with my researching/browsing when I don't "complete/finalize" a thread of thought or tangent of research, examples of which would be looking up a definition or following a source. Having too many tabs is overwhelming and distracting, and when I realize half of them are obsolete and take a second to close them out, things become much clearer/cleaner. So here's my goal and a suggestion, after reading an article that warrants no further research or copying an image/quote from site that I want, close it. With history and google, it's easy enough to find it again if needed so why not keep things clean and increase productivity.