TL;DR

  • Chrome is a shitty to-do list

  • On average, people have ~24 Chrome tabs open at any given time

  • This tendency dilutes our focus and undermines productivity

One of those days

Have you ever had “one of those days”?

We’ve all been there: 8 Zoom calls, a blizzard of Slack messages, a flurry of Google Docs, a barrage of Asana tasks, and an avalanche of email? I had “one of those days” last week. . .

As I stared wearily at my laptop at 7pm, it hit me: Oh my God I just spend 11 hours staring at squares.

I felt tired, maybe even defeated. I couldn’t shake this feeling of fragmented consciousness, as if my mind was in a dozen places at once, whirring about, synaptically—the OPPOSITE of the “Deep Work” we yearn for.

As I despondently closed my laptop for the evening, I noticed Chrome was about to implode under its own weight, and my laptop was so hot I could have warmed a dumpling on it.

Whoa, I wonder how many Chrome tabs I have open right now?

I’m embarrassed to admit it: 28 Chrome tabs. Yes, twenty-eight.

I chuckled at my own subconscious arrogance that I could somehow tackle 28 work items in a coherent way, as if I’m the Magnus Carlsen of simultaneous Chrome matches.

These 28 Chrome tabs, I soon realized, were also creating tremendous anxiety in the form of an always-present, visually-distracting, shitty browser-based to-do list. Most became casualties of the law of diminishing intent. Oh, how I lied: “I’ll come back for you soon, sweet google doc darling.”

How many Chrome tabs do you have open right now?

Then I got curious, so I asked this question to ~60 people. Their responses were astounding:

  • Max: 58 (!!)

  • Me: 28 :(

  • Median: 26

  • Ave: 24

  • Min: 3

I wasn’t alone in my Chrome hall of mirrors! There were others—just like me—that suffered from Chromis tabus metastacitis, a rapidly proliferating disease resulting in anxiety, chronic distraction, and dumpling-hot laptops.

Half-validated, half-terrified, I tried to make sense of the data:

Hardware & tear

Meanwhile, we’ve all heard that Chrome is a “greedy RAM hog.” Even a below-average 15 tabs can consume 2GB of RAM. Most laptops these days have 8-16GB of RAM, so the risk seems modest, honestly. I’ve only had a true Chrome-induced meltdown a couple times in recent memory.

[Not] getting sh*t done

The bigger risk seems to be a drastic overhang on our cognitive throughput, or, less pedantically: we’re distracted as hell. And as a result, we get fewer things done. Priorities slip, deadlines slide.

David Allen, the famous author of Getting Things Done (or GTD to his cult followers) is likely rolling over in his grave right now, laughing at our feeble attempts to GTD while dozens of “open loops” whiz in the background of our browsers & brains.

“But hey, I need to have 12 different softwares open to do my job!”

Perhaps. But simultaneously? I suppose the # of softwares required to do one’s job is highly role-specific.

However, when you look at folk’s browser windows (which, I’ll admit, has become a guilty pleasure during all these pandemic Zoom screen shares), the main culprit seems to be Google: gDocs, gSheets, gSlides. They. are. Everywhere.

As Google Chrome became more and more overloaded, they frantically had to figure out how to dynamically condense the size of each tab once the number of total tabs exceeds five. I’ve seen Chrome windows where the tabs are so numerous that each tab is a few millimeter wide and even the tiny logo is being smushed.

Surely this is no way to work. We can do better.

How to treat Chromis tabus metastacitis

Thankfully, there are ways to treat this rapidly proliferating disease:

  1. The Great Suspender: recommended to me by the über-productive Ian Maier, this Chrome extension will suspend the tab after (customizable) periods on non-use. While this doesn’t solve the visual distraction by auto-closing the tab, it reduces the RAM draw and signals non-use.

  2. Five-Tab: this regiment involves a self-imposed hard cap of 5 Chrome tabs, forcing most people to drastically reduce their tab count. The result: laser focus on only the task on-hand (while passively scanning Slack, Gmail, and gCal, etc). Not a full solution, but a partial cure.

  3. One-Tab: by far the coldest-turkey regiment, this draconian approach is a self-imposed hard cap of 1 Chrome tab. Most folks can’t last a few hours, let alone a day. However, many knowledge workers who depend on deep work put this into practice, i.e. a single doc for the board pre-read, a single spreadsheet for your GTM Financial Model. The power of one.

Are you brave enough to try Five-Tab or One-Tab? Maybe this will become the browser equivalent of “inbox zero.”

Proxy for prioritization

In a sense, the # of Chrome tabs you have open right now might say something about your priorities. Perhaps you have too many; I certainly did. Prioritization is hard because, in the words of Deb Knobelman, “the importance of some tasks is bigger than our interest in doing them.”

Perhaps our copious Chrome tabs represent the novelty we chase when we avoid the work we should be doing.

I’ll leave you with 26 awesome quotes on the value of simplicity, my favorite of which comes from the eternal Bruce Lee:

"It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials."