50 shades of tabs (or: consequences of living with a writer)

[loaded_march]

The Spouse borrowed my phone the other day to look up something, and he boggled when he went to open a new tab and saw that I had 50 tabs open.

Spouse: You have 50 tabs open.  Why do you have 50 tabs open?

Me, shrugging a shoulder: Research.

Spouse: Research for what?

Me: Um.  Well, some of them are research for X book, some of them are for Y, a couple of them are recipes I want to try, but, yeah, mostly they're for the writing.

Spouse: Some of these are just google searches, why don't you close them?

Me: Because they're searches I haven't actually done yet, just reminders of topics I want to look up later.

The Spouse stared at me for a minute, then muttered: I didn't know your phone could still work with that many browser tabs open.

Me: Now maybe you'll understand when I complain that my laptop browser is slow.

The Spouse looked at me with narrowed eyes, and asked: Do I want to know how many tabs you have open on your laptop right now?

Me: No.  No, you really, really don't.

(83, if you were wondering)

Spouse, after finding what he was looking for, said: I'm buying you a notebook so that you can write this shit down and close the tabs.

Me, after a long pause reflecting on all the notebooks I have everywhere in the house -- the very same ones he complains about but seems to have forgotten -- and seeing an opportunity: Can I have a new pen too?

(because there's never too many notebooks or pens)

Comments

[geekslave.livejournal.com]

LOL! Wow, I have way fewer tabs open than you, but I had a similar conversation with my husband a couple of months ago. He borrowed my phone for something and saw that I had like 10 tabs open and wondered why I had so much. He told me I was probably killing my battery with leaving so many open.

At least you might score some new notebooks and pens out of the deal.

Stacey

[loaded-march.livejournal.com]

Common problem is common!

I'm sure I'm killing my phone battery. Any time I have my browser open, my battery drops a few percent real quick.

New notebooks, though!

[kitty_fic]

THIS IS ME!
I relate to this on a spiritual level!
I had almost 200 tabs open one time and my computer HATED me!

Yay for new notebooks and pens!

[loaded-march.livejournal.com]

Before I upgraded my RAM to the maximum that my old laptop can support, I had 60-some tabs open, and the whole thing ground to a halt a lot. Because of that, my cut-off is generally in the 75-ish range before I start regretfully closing tabs. I'm sure I can manage more now that the RAM is doubled, but, yeah, I've been properly conditioned not to do that.

[kitty_fic]

Yeah my OLD laptop would practically catch on fire! But my iMac handles a lot more tabs. But I can still tell when I have too many open. It starts running soooo slow! I only have about 50 open at the moment.

[feanna.livejournal.com]

Yeah, before I cleaned up today (mostly by creating a bookmarks folder with the title "reading this maybe" and another two with research topics) I definitely had like 250 tabs open in one browser window and a few more in another (when you have two screens...) on my PC. Now it's around 50 in one window and 37 in the other one. That is cleaned up!!!! TOTALLY!!! :D
I don't do it on my phone though, I always close everything there.

[loaded-march.livejournal.com]

250 tabs wins all the prizes for bravery, because I'm sure my old laptop would die if I tried that!!

I'm usually away from home when I have ideas for new stories, hence the tabs on my phone...

[diana065.livejournal.com]

Why don't you save them in an app like evernote or pocket ?

Much more practical than actual paper notebooks as it syncs across devices, so you can research on phone and it will automatically sync to the laptop.

[loaded-march.livejournal.com]

Tried; failed to maintain.

[mii-hazeru.livejournal.com]

Have you tried a browser extension? Chrome has OneTab, it lets you save a list (like, actual links) of all your open tabs and restore them whenever you want. It lets you have several different lists/groups, all pretty customizable, iirc. Since it's an extension, I doubt you'd forget it's there if you put it next to your address bar.

[matchboximpala.livejournal.com]

Made me LOL

[katie walker (from livejournal.com)]

I adored reading this entry. Also, I'm lusting after a new notebook and pen, along with a free arm to actually use it...