← Essays

The case for fewer tabs

· 6 min read

I used to treat browser tabs like an external brain. Every unfinished thought got a tab. Every maybe-later article got a tab. By noon the bar looked like a skyline of unfinished intentions.

Closing loops is not productivity theater. It is how attention recovers its edge. When I keep fewer tabs open, sentences get shorter, decisions get cleaner, and the work I actually care about stops competing with ghosts of other work.

The rule that stuck: if I cannot name why a tab is open in one sentence, it closes. The internet will still be there. My focus might not.