In this post I am going to outline the challenge that I face in using browser to do my work. In a future post I will draw together some ideas about what I can do about it.
I am one of those people who routinely has 200 or more open tabs in my browser, spread across several windows. I realise I am a degenerate case but there we are, I don’t seem likely to change.
But browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Brave even though they are mostly capable of handling this aren’t designed for you to work with hundreds of tabs. You end up with things like this. Not, I would argue, very useful.
Then again bookmarks, either in the browser or using services like pinboard.in, are not a very effective approach to dealing with the problem. I can use them to “hide” tabs … but I find that I either forget about them entirely and lose track of what I was looking in to, or I feel uncomfortable because something is hidden from me. History isn’t a great tool here either; it’s like bookmarks but worse, especially since Chrome only holds on to history for 3 months!
The problem is one of doing research, across a range of threads, and multiple open loops.
For example, I am:
- Researching business models for a guide I am writing for work (2 weeks+)
- Exploring a range of topics related to the Elixir programming language, Ecto database layer, and Phoenix web stack (3 months+)
- Carrying on a long-term research project about business strategy (2 years+)
- Keeping up on current news (day-to-day)
- Looking into how to do customer success in a SaaS context (4 weeks+)
- Researching and building parser combinators (2 months+)
- Sketching the outline and business model of a new application (5 months+)
- Working on a pitch deck (3 months+)
- Looking at some Minecraft resources (12 months+)
- Exploring pricing & pricing support services (6 months+)
- Learning Postgresql (2 weeks+)
- Exploring how teams think about strategy together (6 months+)
I mean there are more threads than this, but I’d have to spelunk a lot more tabs to cover it fully. Some of my tabs will be over a year old (about when Chrome last lost everything). A tab in this context represents the current, dangling, end of a train of thought.
Some of these trains of thought have been going on for years. Browser sessions are pretty ephemeral and they don’t very well respect my approach. Sometimes the browser dies and takes a hundred or more tabs with it. Sometimes I get them back, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I end up with a duplicate window and have to weed.
You could say “don’t do this” and maybe you’d be right for you but this is how I am. I’m not going to fight it. That means I need to find a way to adapt the tools to work better for me.