Digital Declutter: Tabs, Tabs, And more Tabs
One of the big dangers coming from tabs is that they can easily serve as a way for us to try and multitask.
But we aren't really multitasking. We're task switching - that is we're switching for one task to next instead of doing two tasks simultaneously.
And task switching can have major consequences. While it may seem like we're getting more done... because I mean I'm doing two things instead of just doing one thing. What researchers have found is that when we're task switching back and forth it actually takes us longer to complete both tasks, rather than if we were just trying to do one thing at a time. We lose some of our concentration every time we shift our attention...
Opening all these tabs is often just a form of digital task switching. I don't actually need all these tabs open at once and it's just about me being able to switch between different things I'm working on.
But too many tabs leads to information overload. Even if I'm not accessing all those tabs at once, my brain is seeing them and processing that something needs to happen. I might think that I'm just focused on the window in front of me, but it takes more and more mental energy to keep me from getting distracted by the task at hand.
And this multitasking with tabs isn't what we want to be doing - even though it can feel like we're getting more done. Studies have found that "heavy media multitaskers" - aka tab power users - perform worse on cognitive tests than people who are limiting the amount of media they are taking in at one time
Additionally, tabs can be especially dangerous for those of us with ADHD because some studies have found that when we're jumping from tab to tab we're actually getting small releases of dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that we use to regulate our emotional responses and it's a critical component of motivation and reward. So when we get that little hit of dopamine our brain is giving us a feel-good chemical as a reward for doing the right thing - basically it's our brain saying, do that thing again. Now sometimes this works great in our favor, we make a good decision and we get some dopamine and our brain is reinforcing that behavior. But we can also get hits of dopamine from things like eating a sugary snack. That's great in the moment, but it can teach us to seek out sugary snacks so that we keep getting that feel-good feeling. And if we're getting dopamine from jumping from tab to tab, that's also a problem, because now we're getting rewarded for task switching... which is absolutely something that we don't want to be rewarding.
Now to be fair, our reward system is a whole lot more complicated than that - there are all sorts of things to take into account like your goals and what else is going on in your life - but it is still something to think about. One thing we should always consider when we're trying to change a habit is how it's being rewarded - if we're trying to change a habit of opening so many tabs, well we need to consider why we want to open so many tabs.
For me, I think it comes down to wanting to always have more and more information at my fingertips. I switch windows and suddenly I'm infused with new information that I can pour-over. Of course, I'm going to get a dopamine hit from that, I love learning new things. But there is also just the hey this is boring and in less than a second, I can be looking at something else. By leaving tabs open with potentially interesting stuff I'm making it easier and easier to stave off those seconds of boredom when that article I'm reading slows down in the third paragraph. But I don't want to make that the basis of having to always jump from tab to tab trying to get that next dopamine hit. I mean have you ever closed Facebook to just immediately just open it again. Our brain is craving that novel experience and we're hoping that our social feed can supply it.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't have any tabs open. As I talked about in the last episode, tabs can serve as a great way for us to extend our working memory in some ways - it's just when we go overboard on tabs that it really becomes a problem. When I'm writing these episodes it is incredibly useful for me to have various tabs open with references I want to be looking at or for looking up definitions of ideas that I want to make sure I really nail.
What we just really want to be sure we're doing is that we're being mindful of how we're open all those new tabs - and then are we closing those loops and closing those tabs before we're moving on to the next thing.
One of the most popular productivity systems in the world is David Allen's Getting Things Done - while I've found that the system isn't exactly ADHD friendly, one tidbit that really stuck out to me is the idea that you have to trust your systems if they're ever going to work. What this means is that if you don't trust your systems you aren't going to use them, so for example, when we don't trust that we're going to get to things on our to-do list, then we stop adding things to it. And this doesn't have to be a specifically conscious decision.
Think about that tab you left open because it was a small thing you wanted to look into - you didn't want to add it to your todo list because it wasn't big enough to warrant an entry - but part of that "not big enough" idea is that we know that we're not going to schedule ourselves to do small things that might not be that important. Do I really need an entire entry to read an article or watch a video.
Well first off, it kind of depends - how important is that video you're supposed to watch? If it's just something that would be fun to watch, then yeah it probably doesn't really need an entry, but what if you're taking an online course and need to watch through the material. Then that might deserve a spot on your calendar or to-do list.
But we're still left with a quandary about what to do about those things that don't deserve an entry - we know that we shouldn't just leave it up as a tab but we also shouldn't add it to our to-do list because we don't want to have that bogged down in minutia either.
One option is to have some sort of reader app like Pocket or Instapaper for those articles you want to read - however, this is where we're going to come in with that idea of trusting your systems again. When I first started using Pocket I would drop in article after article after article and then I wouldn't read any of them... well unless I was stuck somewhere like a plane and didn't have anything else to do. Which means, I stopped trusting that system. Why bother adding articles to it if I'm not going to read them. Sure, I get to close the tab, but that wasn't really the overall goal - I do want to read those articles.
What needs to happen is returning some trust to that system - set up times where you are going to go through that list and at least read some of the articles. And I think that is a task that can make it onto your calendar or to-do list → or maybe it's just something that you can add into your routine, instead of scrolling through Instagram at breakfast you can read some of those articles you saved. Or maybe it something you do at the end of the day to wind down - I mean as long as the articles aren't going to get you wound back up.
And this applies for something like YouTube as well where we've got that handy "watch later" button - well, when exactly is later going to be. If we don't have a reliable system in place to check back on those "watch later" videos then we're not going to trust that system.
This also means that we're going to want to be choosy about what we're allowing ourselves to put on these lists. When we just dump anything and everything into these systems they become unwieldy and a pain to use. Yeah, there was that one article I really wanted to read, but now I have to search through 20 other ones to figure out which one that was. For YouTube, I actually installed an extension called Block the YouTube Feed that does exactly that - when I go to YouTube.com I don't see a bunch of suggested videos, I see a sidebar with some navigation links and then a search bar over a blank screen. Frankly, it's not my favorite... but on the other hand, it has saved me a lot of time just opening tons of videos. Am I going to miss something - yes, I absolutely am, but I was probably still going to miss those things before I installed the extension in the first place, now I'm just not seeing what I'm missing.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I have a similar extension that kills my Facebook feed - this allows me to log into Facebook and look at any mentions that might be interesting to me but not have to worry about getting sucked into the feed and mindlessly scrolling (and opening new tabs)
Of course, this isn't to say that you have to read everything that you add to your readers either - as we discussed in the last episode there is just too much out there to read through everything. It's okay if we let some stuff slip to the wayside. It isn't like there is going to be some prize I get for watching every video on my "watch later" list or reading through every article I've saved to Instapaper.
Now as I've been going through this episode, I'm sure many of you have been yelling at your podcast players, "BUT WHAT ABOUT BOOKMARKS!?"
First, let me admit, that before I was a tab hoarder, I was a bookmark hoarder - if I saw something that I might remotely want to see again, I'd bookmark it. I had hundreds of bookmarks. Of course, I didn't have any kind of system to organize them, so they just constituted one long list that I'd never be able to use to find anything.
Sometimes I'd do an audit and click through a few links to find that many of the pages I'd bookmarked years before weren't online anymore. What was on that page? I have no idea, and I guess I'll never know now. I sure hope it wasn't important.
None the less, bookmarks do serve a purpose in helping us manage our tabs - which is kind of funny since I used to think tabs were a great way to help manage my bookmark addiction. They actually serve each other fairly well, and I think we can jump back to the analogy that I used in the last episode.
So we talked about how we can kind of think of tabs as our working memory - these are the things that are important right now.
Well, we can also think of bookmarks like our long-term memory. These are the things that we're going to want to come back but we don't need to think about right now.
And we can actually have multiple ways that we can use bookmarks because we can also use our bookmark bar - and if you don't have that enable you can usually just find that setting by going to settings and looking for your bookmark settings and clicking show bookmark bar. Or many browsers have a shortcut like cntl+shift+b (or command+shift+b for mac users).
What's great about the bookmark bar is that it can give quick access to those sites that you might normally just leave open in a tab. For example, I've got my calendar, Todoist, and a couple of my Notion pages in my bookmark bar. By having that easy access it means that it's not a big deal if I close any of those tabs when I'm not using them.
But we can take our bookmark bar even further by putting folders up there - by going to your bookmark manager or right-clicking on the bar you can add folders directly onto your bookmark bar. I love this feature. It might seem small, but it actually allows me to really get organized with what I'm including up top. Plus there is a great feature where you can just open everything up in one of those folders all at once. So this great for things where you're going to need a few items open for some kind of workflow. I have one for my podcast that'll open the page where I master my audio, the hacking your adhd website, my podcast hosting page and the place where I make the images for the show.
Now that doesn't really save me all that much time, but it does absolutely help keep me from getting off track because with one click I've got everything that I need open and I can just get to work.
Another thing we've got to think about with bookmarks though, is how we're going to organize them. As I described earlier, just dropping everything into a giant folder is going to mean you're not going to be able to find anything. What we want to do instead is work on creating some sort of folder hierarchy to help put things where we'd look for them when we need them.
This is actually a lot like what we went through for our computer file system in the first episode in this series - Decluttering Your Digital Life. That's right, we're talking about folders in folders. The idea here is that you want to try and create some sort of structure that makes sense for you to navigate when you need a particular link.
Now what's more important than this structure though, is what you are choosing to bookmark because not everything needs a bookmark - and bookmarks are absolutely a place we can get in trouble with some of those more aspirational ideas. We get these ideas in our head about what our next big thing is going to be and we find a bunch of webpages and then we just start adding bookmark after bookmark - and this is actually okay if we're sticking with that file structure idea. If I decide that my next big thing is machine learning and I find a couple of cool sites that can teach me some stuff when then I can create those bookmarks and drop them in a folder like Machine Learning and then have that inside another folder like Hobbies.
Where I find bookmarks are really useful is when there are sites like my Homeowners Association or online bills - I could ostensibly find these through search, but if I bookmark the login page it makes it much easier for me to get to exactly where I need to go. It's these sites that I know I'll eventually have to come back to but not really anytime soon that really need to get bookmarked, because undoubtedly, by the time I need them again, I'll have forgotten how to get there.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Tabs can serve as an easy way to try to multitask - however, multitasking is just task switching. As we switch from task to task to task we're actually decreasing our overall productivity, not increasing it.
Switching tabs can give a hit of dopamine, which only increases our desire to switch tabs more often. We can work on this by being mindful of what kind of tabs we leave open.
A great way to limit tabs is to use services like Pocket or Instapaper that allow us to save articles we want to read for later. By storing them in an external system we remove the temptation to just switch to those articles in the middle of other tasks.
Another alternative to just leaving tabs open is to use your bookmarks for sites that you either visit frequently or just sites that you know you're going to have to come back to eventually. What we don't want to do however is create bookmarks for sites that we just need to keep open temporarily.
