I'm willing to bet you have at least 10 or more tabs open right now.
No? Well, how 'bout that, good for you!
But for the rest of you, and you know who you are! ... Read on, you might be surprised why having too many tabs open isn't great. It's probably not for the reason you think. This is gonna be a wordy one, so get your readers on!
So. I go to all the schools and the central office and I get to look at the laptops, desktops and chromebooks of EVERYONE. And you, mister or missus with the million tabs open, you are not alone. Not at all! In fact, a survey was done that showed 64% of respondents have more than 11 tabs open, with 45% having more than 20.
Like I said, I've been all over, which means I hear all the responses. "I have a system!", "I knooooww....but I need them!" and every once in awhile I'll get a dissertation on why you have so many open and their specific purposes, haha. Look, I get it! I do, really. You guys have a ton of things to keep track of, present, talk about, etc. But here's the thing, you're not nearly as efficient as you think you might be.
There's two primary problems with having a ton of tabs open. The first, and to your surprise not the most important (but still important) is the resource hog that tabs are.
I mean, if I'm being honest it's not even just the tabs it's the browser we use. Chrome is king when it comes to browsers. There's Microsoft Edge (formerly Explorer), Safari for Macs, Firefox, Opera, etc. But most PC using folks use Chrome, and Chrome is a hungry hungry hippo. It just gobbles up memory and resources and the more tabs you have open, the more resources get used. What does that mean? Basically, it means the more tabs open the slower some things might be and for laptop and chromebook users, a faster draining battery.
"...the more tabs you have open, the more resources get used."
But that aside, the biggest issue with multiple tabs is it makes our jobs more bogged down then it needs to be. There was this study done called Parallel Browsing Behavior on the Web , it was a joint study conducted by the Microsoft Research Lab and the University of Washington. Basically, their findings boiled down to the fact that having multiple tabs open doesn't enhance productivity, it just leads to poor multitasking. The big take away points are these...
The study found we switch tabs 57% of the time, resulting in something called the switch cost effect when we change our focus from one task to another
Task switching, which again happens when we keep swapping from tab to tab, can lead to a 40% drop in productivity and that on average, it can take around 23 minutes to get back on track after a task was interrupted.
It increases stress! I mean, I don't need a study to tell me that. I look at your browser with 453 tabs open and I get second hand anxiety just looking at it. But in this study (and in this one) it does show that all that tab switching, resulting in that switch cost effect, causes higher stress and more mental fatigue.
And there's a whole slew of reasons why we have a tab addiction. From loss aversion, to the sunk cost fallacy.
"With this you can open all your tabs you want for the day, click the icon and have them all get sorted there."
Alright, so now you know a bunch of tabs have the propensity to make you feel stressed, riddle you with the switch cost effect, and don't really make you more efficient. So what to do? Here's some things to try and maybe it'll help you with your nasty tab addiction.
Practice mindfulness and be thoughtful with what you actually need for the task at hand. Keeping things in the background like email and your calendar might be fine. But do you need a tab open on a website for a resource you might need for a class three hours from now? Don't get to far ahead of yourself and when you're done with something, close the tab.
Knowing the command CTRL+SHIFT+T. When you hold down CTRL and SHIFT and then hit "T" it will bring back up, in order, the tabs you just closed. So if you have a real worry about closing a tab and needing it again, that can be a little ace up your sleeve.
OneTab. This is an extension you can download in Chrome that will convert all your open tabs into a easy to read list. With this you can open all your tabs you want for the day, click the icon and have them all get sorted there. This can be super helpful but I strongly encourage folks to utilize steps 1 and 2 in addition to this.
In addition to those 3 helpful tips on managing tabs, there's also a built in feature within chrome that is also really cool and can be quite helpful in managing the clutter of a thousand tabs.
It's called tab pinning. If you right click on a tab right now, you'll see something like this. If you click on "Pin" it will pin the tab to the right side of your screen. In addition, you can create tab groups! You can name these groups like "Resources" or "Google Stuff" or "Recipes I shouldn't be looking at at work but I have to wait for these kids to finish this activity and I'm hungry as hell, don't judge me." Ya know, normal things like that!
