How many tabs do you have open right now?

Have you heard of the phrase Tab Zero yet? I’m trying to make it a thing. 

I didn’t make it up - possibly this guy did. Googling Tab Zero does not come up with many relevant results. But I think this is an integral part of being successful in this moment of the information age.

Just like we let email go crazy and lead us to need philosophies (like Inbox Zero) and processes (like GTD) to manage our inboxes, we’ve now allowed our tab situations to get totally out of control, and we need philosophies (Tab Zero) and processes to get our time and our sanity back. I share my process for getting to Tab Zero as part of my 5-Day Shut Down Your Computer challenge, but the outcome is that I never have more tabs open than something I am directly working on, and it is easy for me to close my tabs. In fact, I’m so confident about my system that I have the setting in Chrome set to NOT recover my last tabs after I closed the browser window:

The classic misuse of Chrome tab windows is to ask them to be some sort of repository for things we are “currently working on (just not right at this moment)” or things we need to do but “don’t want to forget about” or things that we “want to read later”. But we sometimes casually joke about how we end up with a thousand tabs for these reasons. Chrome takes up so much memory on your computer that these tabs will absolutely slow down the performance of your computer. But it will also slow the performance of your brain. In those tabs you are seeing little indicators of “other work” or something else your attention could be on at any given moment. This is extremely distracting and also has flavors of multi-tasking in there (and we all know multi-tasking isn’t great, right?). 

But that doesn’t mean that we should always only have 1 tab open and then no tabs open when you close it. It means that you only have the tabs open that you need for the one thing you are working on - the one task or project you are committing yourself to in any given moment. This week I was focusing on one project and I had 8 tabs open for it. Yes you read that correctly - the person evangelizing Tab Zero had 8 tabs open!

Did I really need all those tabs open? I asked myself this question a couple of times while I was working. Here’s the context:

I have a Google Sheet that uses an add-on to run reports from SurveyMonkey to get the results from one of our surveys (without having to log into SurveyMonkey every time to download it. At first, I didn’t mind the fact that every Friday I would have to open up the sheet, open the add-on, click the button to run it, and then WAIT (because if I went to another tab while it was running, it could mess up the process and the results). But it grew old pretty quickly, and I have to admit that I would forget to do it sometimes! Repetitive, manual tasks are just not really for me.

Luckily, working on another project had shown me the power of using APIs to automate data pulling (also known as “running reports”) and that there is a Google add-on that can help with these APIs. So I set about the task of automating my process. That took information from all of these tabs:

1. The Google Sheet that I had been updating weekly and wanted to automate. 
2. A “testing” google sheet where I tried out using the Google Add-on that I found to help with pulling data with APIs. The plan is to move my work to the original sheet when it is solid. 
3. SurveyMonkey - I read on the internet that I could use the “inspect” feature on Chrome to find the ID of the survey we were pulling data from (I needed it for writing an API call and it worked!). Maybe I could have closed this tab when I was done getting that ID - I left it open in the thought that I might need other IDs as well.
4. SurveyMonkey API documentation page - typically the documentation for API calls is sort of like the manual for how to work with these things, and I referred back to it often as I was doing my work. (BONUS: SurveyMonkey provided a magical link that brought their API calls into my API client (Postman.com - see below). For someone just getting started with APIs, this felt like a magical gift from heaven). 
5. Postman. This is what we call an “API Client” - it helps you write APIs. So the Google Add-on is also an API Client tool. Each of these API Clients have their own special flavor and capabilities. I also referred back to and did work in Postman as part of my work on this project.
6. SurveyMonkey Settings. Now here is a tab I really could have closed - it was the page where I could find a secret code (authentication token) that I needed provide in my API Client to prove that I was someone with a SurveyMonkey login and was allowed to be accessing the data in the system.
7. The result of my google search for “can you use the API to pull all surveymonkey survey results?” - yes, I ask the internet questions like it is my best friend, in straight up English, even for complex technical tasks. This is a page from the Microsoft power users forum of all places (Where things are on the internet can be funny), which answered my question and gave me the confidence that I was on the right path. It had some tidbits in it I kept referring back to, but this is another tab I probably could have closed.
8. The result of my google search for “how do I find the ID of my survey in surveymonkey?” - it was a page from Stackoverflow, telling me how to find what I needed. Here is another tab I likely should have closed right after I used it.

So now I see as part of my reflection that I still have some work to do on my mindset for what tabs I need open while I am working, and what are really distractions. But the greater point is that when you are focused on a single task or project, there is nothing wrong with having open all of the tabs that you need for it! But when you get interrupted, or have to move on to something else, or finished up one task in your project and need to switch to a different task, you should be able to close down ALL of these tabs. Sure, you might have to open them up again. Great. There is a Chrome extension called “Tab Saver” that you can use to save those tabs for that discreet work.

BUT BEWARE - do not fall into the trap of having those tabs open because “you are coming back for them” or “need to remember what you are doing”. NO. Write that ish down and CLOSE YOUR TABS. 

Need more help closing tabs, getting to Inbox Zero, managing your tasks, and generally having a better relationship with your technology? Join my Shut Down Your Computer Challenge for practical, applicable steps for taking control of your digital life and spending more time making an impact on the world.