Help, I have 40 tabs open and I can’t close any of them

By Wednesday morning, my workspace has often become a scene of chaos. Stats from games, packets from meetings, little sticky notes trying to remind me of all of the random tidbits of information that I’m definitely going to forget because I forgot they were on the sticky note in the first place. Ad lists, corrections, picture adjustments, papers upon papers accumulated throughout the week.

It’s not ideal. I don’t like it. But it’s the nature of the beast. At least there’s a wiping of the slate, so to speak, once the paper is done on Wednesday. A genuine relief at being able to rid my desk of the past week’s worth of mess, tossing it all away to be recycled into something hopefully better.

Regardless, the feeling of a clean workspace on Wednesday afternoon certainly creates an uplifting atmosphere. I won’t pretend to be the most organized human on the planet, but there’s something to be said about being able to see the desk that definitely exists underneath the chaos of papers.

The same eventual cleanliness can not really be applied to my virtual workspace. Look, there are reasons why I have 33 tabs open in my browser at any given time. And they are good ones too. Just…uh, give me a moment… See, this job a lot of times requires me to bounce around to a couple different things at once. Four different emails to monitor, two instances of Google Drive open, probably six or seven stories opened up…I mean, we are looking at over ten just with the bare basics. Oh, don’t forget at least one tab for Facebook and other social media to try to keep on top of things going on in the community that way too. I also usually have the school calendars for both Abbotsford and Colby open at all times…so, okay, maybe by default we are inching closer to 15. But the thing is, each of those articles probably has at least two or three corresponding tabs open. A lot of times more. Notes, stats, research pages, I’m constantly flipping through tabs.

Could I close them when I’m done? Yes, that is certainly an option, and maybe it would even be a smart one, as I sit here trying to determine what tab is this column based on a sliver of an indicator on my Google Chrome browser.

But what if I need that tab later? What if I'm going back through a game recap and I realized I needed clarification on something and then I have to take whole precious seconds bringing up that stat sheet again? I’d rather not fathom such a horrible fate. Think of the supposed inefficiency!

I could blame this on the nature of the job, but truthfully, I do it at home too. I don’t know what it is, but I feel like I have some sort of hoarder mentality when it comes to these things. I’ll constantly have 13 apps running in the background on my phone (even though 99 percent of them take no time at all to reboot after you close them) and the amount of tabs that get moved over to the “you haven’t looked at these in weeks, so we are just going to set them over here in this separate area where you definitely won’t remember they exist, you weirdo” section on the Google Chrome app is often larger than I’d like to admit.

Look, you just never know when that Wikipedia article on the eventual heat death of the universe or the ESPN article on why the Brewers are going to be terrible this year (just kidding, of course ESPN would never write an article on the Brewers) might be useful, so probably best to just leave it open just in case, right?

Apparently, it’s not just me that does this, and some preliminary research on the subject seems to suggest that tab hoarding actually can lead to increased stress and productivity loss. It gives the illusion of making multitasking possible, when typically it is more efficient to focus on one task, complete it, and then move on to the next.

Will that knowledge make me cut down on the multitude of tabs? Umm…hopefully? But I really do need those emails open, and I can’t really close those articles either, and when you think about it, that Wikipedia page on the heat death of the universe is pretty important too…I dunno, I’ll workshop it and see what I come up with. Maybe less tabs are in my future, but something tells me that probably won’t be the case.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER