Please help with tab panic - 3020 firefox tabs are making me go insane

I disagree, because:

The flip side of that is that with much lower friction and a better interface, they’re also right there, in your face, creating more distraction and anxiety. Exactly because of that lower friction.

I already have thousands of URLs in various documents, bookmarks, etc., which I need to go through at some point, and those aren’t anywhere near as much of a concern.

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@zedmango just wait until your browser‘s session management crashes and you lose all your tabs :wink:

I do actually want to read these web pages. Not that it would be a disaster if I couldn’t, but there is a reason I keep them around, and that is for the sake of actually reading them.

So I actually want low friction. If the friction was higher, I’d end up reading less of them, and that would be moderately sad.

But if it’s causing you panic, sure, it could make sense to do that. Part of the reason I don’t panic is that I know that I have things under control (with Beeminder), and I know that I eventually will get to most of them at some point or another.

And that is why you back up your browser tabs, the same way you backup every other piece of information you don’t want to lose. I use Tarsnap for my computer backups, but whatever tool or service you use I definitely recommend including your browser profile in it.

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I assume my browser tabs are backed up. But I know I wouldn’t bother to restore them out of a backup in case I lost them. Even though TimeMachine makes this very very easy.
Most of them I can research again rather quickly. Some of them won’t even be applicable anymore by the time I would get to actually read through them. Some I would read and then couple minutes later forget about again.
Sometimes, yes, there is a few tabs that took some effort to get to. Yes. But so far Safari has been good to me and I don’t remember when I last lost one of those.

Yes, in practice browsers usually don’t crash and eat your tabs. It’s nice to have backups anyway, both for piece of mind and to make it easy when you switch to a new computer.

It is true that many tabs aren’t that interesting or worthwhile when you actually get to them. Sure, so you close it and move on to the next one. That you’ve got something in your backlog to look at should never be treated as a commitment.

My Beeminder goal whose graphs I shared above is very intentionally a whittle-down goal measuring the number of open tabs I have. For each tab, it doesn’t matter if I read it deeply or realize that it’s not worth reading and close it, or anything in between.

This works really quite well: I get to read some really interesting things that would otherwise have fallen by the wayside, and I never have force myself to read things I don’t want to.

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Notion is good, but bloated. I’ve been using Roam since last year and loving it. I’m sure people here will dig it.

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Can you give me more info on Roam? I can’t tell much from that website. Is it only for macs?

Roam’s a web app. It’s pretty new, but there’s a lot to like about it. It’s kinda outliney, kinda “web of knowledge”-y.

@adamwolf @caffo

Anyone know if it has a web clipper?

not yet. its pretty beta-ish

Possibly related: https://www.beeminder.com/d/tabdeath

In a recent beemail @dreev mentioned he’d talk more about it so I eagerly await his thoughts!!

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For anyone who’s curious: the tab limit on iPhone Safari is 500. Don’t ask me how I know :sweat_smile:

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Seems as if there is actually some interest in beeminding Safari tabs, guess it’s coding time!

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Sorry for dropping the ball so hard on my quasi-promise (I guess I deftly avoided explicitly committing by saying “I want to talk about it more in the forum” but then I said “stay tuned” so, yeah, that was within epsilon of committing to do it!) to talk about how I’m beeminding browser tabs. I keep thinking I’ll improve what I’m doing and wanting to wait to describe it but I guess I’ve asymptotically approached something workable so let me go ahead:

First, I got a Chrome extension that just shows me my total number of open tabs across all browser windows:

image

Then, in flagrant violation of the QS First principle, which I don’t feel great about violating, I don’t actually track that number. Instead I have a do-more goal to just close ~1 tab per day – bmndr.com/d/tabdeath which @zedmango linked to. In the comment of my datapoint I put the current count from the Chrome extension (I’m just doing this manually – it’s easy enough).

And then my rule for +1’ing my Beeminder goal is this: Either I close a tab that represents an actual task, by doing the task and giving a couple-word description of what it was in the datapoint comment, or I just get the total number of tabs down to one less than the previous number.

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