Becoming a Reformed Tab Hoarder

I have talked a lot about how I collect tabs. My way of saving things for later is to stuff them into a tab and leave them there until I need them. I’ve been doing this for years, and while it’s not the most efficient workflow one could have, it works for me. I’m not the biggest tab hoarder I’ve met (Hi, Mom!) but I can get into the mid-100s from time to time.

But I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I don’t think I want to hoard tabs anymore, and there are a few reasons why.

1. I don’t like how inefficient this is.

When I want to find something, it’s a hassle to do it. I would like to find it now; I would like to be able to remember where I put it, and I want to know it’s there in the first place. But having ideas and such saved for later in a tab, they tend to get lost, even with the awesome organizational tools that come with my favorite web browser, Vivaldi.

Moreover, often these things languish in a tab and just never get looked at. My original reason for adopting this way of doing things, and I’ve talked about this before, is that by having my to-dos and ideas in a tab, I would see those things often. I browse through my workspaces and tab stacks all the time, and I would then be constantly reminded of the things I had wanted to save.

But I’ve found over the years that this is less and less true. While I do still see the tabs all the time, if I’ve ignored a tab for six months, chances are there is a good reason for me to do so. Namely, whatever that tab is really isn’t all that important.

So, I have tabs that are months and months old, and I don’t need to keep them open. Will I need them eventually? Maybe. The old me would make that mean that I needed to keep that tab open. The new me has vowed to take those old tabs and either close them or save them as a note and then close them.

Now, I know that this is what I should have been doing all the time. But it took me a lot of time to realize that being a tab hoarder is really just a messy way of doing it. It makes it just too difficult to find the things I need to find.

2. Nothing is available anywhere else.

Vivaldi is trash on iOS. It’s not really Vivaldi’s fault, as anything outside of Safari is garbage, but it’s still the truth. Because it is the truth, I don’t really have access to my tabs everywhere I go. And it makes it hard because sometimes I need some of the things I save as tabs. So, I need a way to save some things, at least, with me when I’m not at my computer. Or when I’m on a computer that’s not my main desktop because Vivaldi sync has been a little sus lately.

Having something like floccus or a note or something like that will make this situation much, much better.

3. I want to use Firefox.

I love Vivaldi. But it has been a little buggy lately. I also just want to use Firefox for a while. And transferring my open tabs over to a new browser is a pain in the ass. It is much easier to transfer over 20 tabs than it is to transfer over 200.

Will I stick with Firefox? I don’t know. But if I do switch back to Vivaldi, I won’t have to switch so many tabs again. So less is going to make switching easier if I choose to do so.

What the Future Holds

I don’t have a real solution to replace the tab hoarding yet. I have thought about floccus, which is an app to sync and save bookmarks. But that doesn’t work great on iOS (because of the dumb browser situation). I could do regular browser bookmarks or notes or Pocket; there are any number of solutions.

The pitfall here is that I will shop around for solutions and not find one that is perfect, and keep moving from solution to solution, never being as happy as I was with workspaces and tab stacks. This would be even less efficient than I am now with a ton of tabs.

If I find a solution, I will share it. Wish me luck.