triage a million tabs down to tab-zero

Jeeeeezus I just noticed that I have 162 tabs open on my phone! Sidenote: I take it for granted but I am impressed that both my phone and its mobile browser are able to function with so many tabs open.

This tab hoarding happens organically over time and about once a year it comes to a head and I do something about it. A few times I have declared bankruptcy and closed all the tabs, only to remember a reference to a needle in that particular haystack a few days later and sigh in frustration. Not a great outcome.

In some previous attempts I start working my way through the open tabs one by one. I make some forward progress by closing the erroneously left open tabs, but progress quickly stalls when I get to any “read it later” tabs as I inevitably fail to read through this backlog. Also not a great outcome.

Eventually I got smart and took a different tact and started to save the “Read later” entries using an external tool. First it was Evernote (zombie), then Pocket (RIP), and now Obsidian. But even then I would still have a bunch of tabs left over.

And this is where I found myself in my most recent tab-purge.

So what’s up with those leftovers? Well, they fit into one of two remaining categories:

1. It is a resource that I need to take some action against at a later date. For example, the tab might be a GitHub repo related to a project or design I’m working on and need to “Assess the component in GitHub repo for project X”.
2. It is a specific place that I need to remember. For example a bespoke keyboard switch store, or an actually useful AWS EC2 overview reference page.

Now that I’ve categorized the buckets of tabs and why I’ve ostensibly left them open, I have the tools I need to finish up the tab pruning. So for each tab pick one of:

1. Close it. I don’t need it anymore, and probably didn’t need it in the first place…
2. Add to a reading list. Scrape it into Obsidian to read later and then close it.
3. Create a To-Do. Add an entry in Things with a discrete action to take and a link to the resource and then close it
4. Save a bookmark. This is an appropriate course of action for a place that I want to come back to.

If I’m not sure and feel like I need to leave the tab open for some reason, that’s a good hint that I should convert it into a To-Do.