Heh, I think you might be onto something here.

I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right now.

I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent projects.

I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses many tabs, or vice versa.

My tabs get as messy as my desk. Eventually, I hit a point where the mess bothers me. So I clear it all out and get back to a clean slate.

With the desk, the “this bothers me” moment is very physical/spatial, when I realize I’m now working around the mess (most often, mail I haven’t yet been bothered to look through).

With the tabs, the mess always builds up when I’m in the early phases of starting or investigating something, but as I get going, the mess becomes a distraction I’m mentally working around. So I’ll start dropping tabs that are no longer relevant. I have a tendency to “group” my tabs in separate windows by topic, and eventually I’ll just start closing a window with a dozen or more tabs at a time when that topic is handled or otherwise irrelevant. It’s like finally going through my mail that’s been piling up.

/me glances at my (cluttered) desk

There are apparently 2 kinds of people...

Four kinds of people. My desk is always a mess, but I close my tabs every day.

Technically, we now have evidence for three. There is no evidence yet for people with a clean desk but messy tabs ;)

But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on the location of a prime specimen and see what happens when we breed them with the third kind to establish if there is a genetic component to this.

Clean desk but messy tabs here. I like the aesthetics of clean interior design, it’s peaceful and inspiring like a blank whiteboard. Also, nobody can see my tabs.

My girlfriend will stop and clean the house if she sees a crumb, but I don’t think she knows she can close tabs. She probably has a tab for everything she’s ever looked at on the internet. They never go away. It’s as overwhelming to me as my inability to spot a crumb is to her.

I used to have a completely clean desk at an engineering company where everyone had piles and piles of spec sheets, documentation, and first articles strewn around. People thought I didn't work, so I piled up a few things here and there to gather dust and look "messy" and kept the working area of my desk clean :)