I have a hard time closing out what is essentially my thought process to finding a solution or doing research. Along the way I close out dead branches. What remains is either a solution or where I have left off. I think my mental barrier is what it represents: my time capital sunk. The issue is working around this many tabs and managing it; a time sink in itself to fix.
Started documenting completed solutions in Obsidian and I've found that if I can't get over my lazy barrier to even enter it in, it's probably not important. Just have to keep working on improving and refining the way I think and approach this.
does research get you to have so many open? How do you manage it all? I've only just started using Sidebery but I try to keep my tabs at a reasonable 100-200 open.
Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with GitHub it’s all markdown-based so I can throw images, files and whatever else I need in a session in there to keep it all encompassing.
I have a Python script which I can use to kill all chrome.exe so that next time the machine boots, chrome offers me to restore the tabs which where open before the crash.
I only use this when I know that the tabs are really important and I need to continue using them the next day. Else Chrome starts with a single custom startpage which contains links and as well as views to Jira projects (like a to-do list via the Jira API). And during the day I bookmark all tabs I find important and clean up. But it's usually around 4 windows with each around 10 - 20 tabs which accumulate during the day, in addition to dedicated browser profiles which serve specific purposes, like email or developer consoles.
My current solution is that, through a stroke of luck and a lot of pent up frustration, I've managed to habituate the following behavior:
WHEN I notice I've been procrastinating for too long, OR I'm getting anxious about so many "open loops" in the browser, OR I lose track of specific tabs I know are open and spend more than two seconds looking for it, THEN I find the last Actually Important tab (usually somewhere between the third and the tenth from the left), right-click on it, select "close tabs to the right", and confirm the closure of 100-200 tabs.
I do this a few times on a typical week; because its habituated, I do it fast enough that the FOMO of "but I actually wanted to read that, and that, and that" doesn't have time to kick in.
feel free to try it out:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
I like exhaustive deep dives so will explore as many sources as I can find, until my attention wanes, or I find a solution.
Have signed up for Readwise beta which will hopefully help me to add a layer to store/consume information before it info gets committed to Obsidian. Other link/article aggregators have not been successful for me as it just becomes another repository to manage.
Will have to look into sidebery, haven't seen that before!
So if you have 700 tabs and 600 of them you haven't opened in a month, you'll see them and it might make a difference in your habits. It also makes it easier to surf your open tabs when you're bored, rather than surfing randomly and adding new tabs.