Let’s talk about your cluttered browser. It’s about time we fix it!!
About a month ago, I realised my browser is loading slower than usual. Could these 20 open tabs be culprit? Maybe but I needed to open a few more to go through clients’ feedback. So, after 30 minutes of sluggish browsing and few tabs later, my Chrome crashed..
ohh the horrors.. I lost all the links I was working on and I had to spend next week asking around and collating it in a spreadsheet.
Sounds familiar? If yes, then you’d also relate to these problems of cluttered browser tabs..
Problems with cluttered browser tabs
Slows down your computer
You must have already realised this but keeping many open tabs ( more than 5 to 10 tabs) sucks your computer memory dry and every other action ( which you really need) gets slower. Which means, editing in docs gets slow so does opening a Figma file or everything else.
This also makes switching between tabs slower since bringing the tab you need in focus needs lot of those memories.
Slows you down (distracts from focussing on main work)
Your brain silently records and reacts to everything; even when you actively aren’t acknowledging it. When you have multiple tabs open — that youtube video or, that fun inspiration site you had casually opened or, that medium article you had opened to read later — are constantly seeking attention.
While you try to actively ignore these; keeping them open isn’t going to be of any help. Best you park them OUT-OF-SIGHT and open ONLY when you are going to act on it.
Makes it hard to find what you are looking for.
Needless to say, when you have all the tabs open — whether or not related to a project; switching to exactly the link you need isn’t easiest.
Remember when you had to go back & forth guessing may be this one is the right tab. Yeah, you could totally avoid that by keeping the minimum tabs you need to work on.
Pro-tip: You can search through all your open tabs in Chrome.
Causes browser to crash
This one’s really painful. Your browser needs system memory to continue working. Each open tabs takes up some part of it.
When your browser runs out of memory — welll that’s the BIG BANG! and you browser either becomes unresponsive or, crashes completely or need a restart.
And when that happens, there’s no saving your open tabs. All your projects links are gone and scattered across your history and what not.
Good thing is you can avoid this by saving your sessions and keeping your important links organised.
How to avoid ending up with hundreds of open tabs
There are many ways you can organise your work in browser — but everything comes down to knowing what are the links you needs at the moment v/s ones you need later ( or not at all ).
Once you know that, there are few apps which can really help you organise your important links and be more productive.
This Free Chrome extension is bookmarks alternative on steroid let’s you quickly organise and access your useful links within seconds.
Here’s the why I like it the most — you can share Quickmark collections with your team — so they have their project related links in one place. This is something I couldn’t do with my default bookmarks and I love it.
Now, whenever a team member joins, I can just share my Quickmark collection with him/her, instead of sharing a dump of spreadsheet.
Quickmark also helps you to..
- Save your entire session ( all open tabs ) in one click.
- Keep collection synced on cloud and access it across different chrome profiles.
- Extracts and shows all your popular links (Google docs, sheets, Figma files etc. ) in the same place
- Search within Google Drive, GMail, Youtube, Maps and many others.
Download Quickmark Chrome extension
This is another Chrome extension that turns new tab of your Chrome into collection of your favorite links.
If you are okay with sacrificing your new tab ( doesn’t work if you are already using a new tab extension), this can nicely help you navigate with your collection of links.
Creating list is easy and you can drag-drop your open tabs into list. This saves your collections locally so, you can’t access this across device or accounts but works well otherwise.
Workona is a chrome extension to not only save your important links but also breaks them down into workspaces.
It needs bit of getting used of its core concept — which is to be able to switch between workspaces (a group of tabs altogether.). So, if you open a workspace; all tabs from your previous workspace will get closed and collapsed.
Also, it keeps one of the page opened and pinned to do all the work.
But if you can live with it; it offers a really good session manager to switch between your work.
Conclusion
We are sure without doubt that keeping multiple unused tab is not only harmful for your browser but also, makes your distracted and unproductive.
To overcome this, you can choose to organise your chrome sessions in many different way from default bookmarks or something more collaborative like Quickmark.
I’d suggest using something that is suggestive but not too opinionated. Choose something that goes with your natural flow without you having to adopt to new way of working.
Hope you find this article helpful and organise your work better in Chrome. If it did, please do considering sharing this. Have any other thought? let us know in comments.
Have a productive day ahead!!
