What to actually do about eighty open tabs

I counted mine once, during a week I was pretending to be organised: eighty-one tabs across four windows. Two of them were things I was actually doing. The rest were a filing system I had built by accident and could not read.

The advice you get for this is always some version of close them. Which is true and useless, because if closing them were easy you would have done it. The interesting question is why a particular tab is hard to close, and it turns out there are only a few reasons — and they need different answers.

Sort the pile before you fight it

Go through a window and put each tab in one of these:

Working on it now. Genuinely in use. Usually three to six, sometimes ten if you are debugging something horrible. These are fine. Nobody has a tab problem because of these.

Reference for the current task. Docs, a Stack Overflow answer, a spec. They stop being needed the moment the task ends, and they survive because nobody goes back to tidy up afterwards.

I want to read this. Articles, threads, a long post someone linked. Might be forty of your eighty.

Something happens here later. A ticket page that goes on sale Friday. A form that closes on the 3rd. A stream that starts at eight. A pull request waiting on someone else.

I have no idea. Honestly, a lot of them.

Four of those five are solvable with things you already have. The fourth is not, and it is the one that quietly generates the rest.

The three you can just fix

The working on it now tabs are not a problem. Leave them.

The reference tabs need a habit rather than a tool: close them when the task ends, in a sweep, without reading them again. If you cannot bring yourself to, that means one of them has quietly become a want to read this, so move it there and close the rest.

The no idea tabs get closed. All of them. If you cannot remember why a tab is open, it is not doing its job — a tab is supposed to be a reminder, and a reminder you cannot interpret is just a coloured rectangle. In three months of doing this I have never once regretted closing one, and I have never been able to reconstruct what any of them were for.

Bookmarks handle the want to read this pile, but badly, and that is worth its own article — the short version is that a bookmark is a place you have to remember to go, which is the same problem in a different folder.

The fourth pile is the actual problem

Something happens here later.

This is the tab you cannot close, and you cannot close it because closing it would delete the only record that the thing exists. The tab is not storing a page. It is storing a page and a date, and it can only store one of those.

So it stays open. And then it drifts: by Thursday your Friday ticket page is somewhere in the middle of a strip of thirty favicons, indistinguishable from the rest, silently no longer reminding you of anything. The mechanism has failed and you will not find out until Saturday.

Everything else in the pile grows out of this one, in my experience. Once you have established that tabs are how you remember things, every other kind of tab inherits the same immunity from being closed.

What that pile actually needs

Two facts, stored together: the page, and when.

A calendar entry has the when but not the page — you get a notification at 10am that says “tickets” and you go looking for the site. A bookmark has the page but not the when, so it waits in a folder for a moment that never arrives. A to-do app has both but you have to type them, which means you do it for the important three and not for the other twenty.

This is the gap Latr was built for, and I built it because I was the person with eighty-one tabs. You are on the page. You press one key, or highlight the date the page itself tells you and right-click it. The tab closes. At the right time the page comes back — the actual page, in a new tab, scrolled to where you were if you were part-way through it.

The bit that changed my behaviour was not the reminder. It was that closing the tab stopped feeling like throwing something away. That single change is what emptied the other four piles, because they were only ever full to keep the fourth one company.

What about tab groups and suspenders?

They are good at what they do and they do not do this.

Tab groups make eighty tabs legible. They do not make any of them closable, and a collapsed group is a folder you have to remember to open — you have converted a visible pile into a hidden one. Genuinely useful for the working on it now and reference piles.

Suspenders fix memory, not attention. The tab is still there, still taking a slot in the strip, still needing a decision one day.

Session managers are the most seductive because they feel like closing tabs. You save the window and reopen it later, so you have moved eighty tabs into a saved session you will open once and never again. I have several of these. They are archives of things I meant to care about.

None of them are wrong. They are all answering “how do I keep these tabs” when the useful question for the fourth pile is “what would let me close this one”.

A version you can try this afternoon

Close every tab you cannot explain. Do not read them first.
For every tab where something happens later, put the page and the date somewhere together, then close it.
Put your reading pile in one place — one place, not four — and give the ones with a deadline a date.
Come back in a week and see which piles refilled.

For me it was the reference pile, every time, because I never sweep at the end of a task. So that one is a habit I still do not have, and the honest answer is that a tool cannot fix it.

The one that stopped refilling was the fourth. Once a page with a date attached has somewhere to live, it stops living in the tab strip.

If you want the tool, Latr is free and takes about a minute to set up. If you want the method, the method is above and it works with whatever you already use.