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cadadrThis post used to be titled «tabocide», but since then I've grown a dislike to that name, and also modified my process a bit, so I renamed the post and edited it a bit to reflect how I do it now. The main difference is I don't keep tabs open anymore, but instead keep them in a bookmarks folder.
Something I do with some regularity is «tabqueueing and tabdequeueing»
Basically, instead of keeping tabs open in my browser, I shove them regularly as they accumulate into a folder called
The aim is to do this once every week, but usually it's once or twice every month. As tabs near and surpass a hundred-ish, I get nervous (because even tho I have pretty good backups these days, I don't ever trust Firefox to not bork my session and get me in trouble, something which it has done a lot). Also for this purpose and for keeping the browser performant, I've modified the process to queue the bookmarks in a bookmarks folder, instead of just keeping them open in a browser window.
This way I can keep on top of many tabs.
A question that probably comes to your mind is, why not use a reading list / bookmarks / ... for this purpose. Well, that is probably a better way to do it (not to mention lighter on my computer), but fact of the matter is, something that goes into a list, in my case, tends to stay there, unattended, unless I set up a separate workflow for each list. As in, if I was shoving abstracts into a "check these abstracts later" list, they'd never get looked at. That will lead to all my reading lists overflowing with random stuff I found interesting and gave no proper consideration as to whether I need it or not.
This way, I can keep my reading lists fairly cleaner and I don't end up with thousands of stuff in my Zotero database with a reading list longer than a few bibles worth of pages. That's what tab(de)queueing is about for me: looking at things, judging whether I want to come back to them later, as opposed to just mopping things up as I encounter them.
Something I do with some regularity is «tabqueueing and tabdequeueing»
Basically, instead of keeping tabs open in my browser, I shove them regularly as they accumulate into a folder called
tabqueue, and close them. After, when I have the time, I schedule a tabdequeue session where I process these bookmarks one by one, after opening them all in a fresh new window and deleting the tabqueue folder, and moving the tabs open on my phone there also (for this purpose I use KDEConnect). Of course I don't just throw them away, but they get reviewed, and they have a few fates available to them:- new papers / books / other publications accumulate from reading RSS feeds mostly, they get shoved into my reference manager (Zotero these days) or dismissed;
- news or opinion articles, blog posts, and similar, that accumulate over time, get read and/or bookmarked on the spot, otherwise dismissed or shoved into Instapaper;
- fediverse posts, mostly my own, which get dismissed or get copied to my digital notebooks;
- I'll often have web searches open, usually on DuckDuckGo or Google Scholar&emdash;these usually get turned into to do items if can't be processed on the spot;
- and finally a random assortment of stuff that gets treated ad hoc, often Github repositories or other software=y stuff, temporary tabs that got forgotten, etc.
The aim is to do this once every week, but usually it's once or twice every month. As tabs near and surpass a hundred-ish, I get nervous (because even tho I have pretty good backups these days, I don't ever trust Firefox to not bork my session and get me in trouble, something which it has done a lot). Also for this purpose and for keeping the browser performant, I've modified the process to queue the bookmarks in a bookmarks folder, instead of just keeping them open in a browser window.
This way I can keep on top of many tabs.
A question that probably comes to your mind is, why not use a reading list / bookmarks / ... for this purpose. Well, that is probably a better way to do it (not to mention lighter on my computer), but fact of the matter is, something that goes into a list, in my case, tends to stay there, unattended, unless I set up a separate workflow for each list. As in, if I was shoving abstracts into a "check these abstracts later" list, they'd never get looked at. That will lead to all my reading lists overflowing with random stuff I found interesting and gave no proper consideration as to whether I need it or not.
This way, I can keep my reading lists fairly cleaner and I don't end up with thousands of stuff in my Zotero database with a reading list longer than a few bibles worth of pages. That's what tab(de)queueing is about for me: looking at things, judging whether I want to come back to them later, as opposed to just mopping things up as I encounter them.