I feel a bit silly posting something this trivial in this comm, but I know I'm not the only one with an absurd number of browser tabs open—in my case, the figure is around 1500 tabs open across all my devices, and it's constantly growing. Every once in a blue moon I'll go and close like 50 of them in one day, but it's not frequent enough to reverse the trend. It's to the point where it's a coin flip whether a new tab in my mobile browser will actually work, and I have genuinely run into out-of-memory issues on my fairly beefy PC where stuff will straight-up crash. Beyond the technical issues, it's overwhelming, especially on the PC where I'm actually confronted with the staggering quantity of the tabs whenever I'm actually using it and I have to sift through them to find the few tabs I use frequently (idk what I'd do without the tab search function on modern browsers).
I thought it might be neat for other people with the same issue to congregate and work together to make incremental net reductions in our tab counts (so you can't just close 10 tabs and then open 15 more!). I was thinking that 10 tabs per day might be a reasonable figure—small enough to be manageable, but big enough that even with a few thousand tabs you could still make significant progress. Everyone is free to set a goal that fits their parameters, although I'd err on the side of caution. If you set a goal that's too ambitious, you could quickly miss your target and get frustrated. Slow and steady wins the race! Of course, with this sort of thing it will tend to get harder as you go along, since you'll go for the low hanging fruit first and then need to either make tougher decisions or have tabs that take longer to resolve (e.g. "am I gonna spend 15 minutes reading this article or just close it?"), so adjustments may be necessary later in the process. And if you do miss a day or a target, don't beat yourself up about it—it's a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes you need to a take a breather. Just make sure to get back in there.
We could each make posts in the weekly self-improvement thread^[I'd also encourage you to post any other self-improvement things you're working on while you're at it!] and edit them daily, posting our new totals as we go. For instance:
Monday: 1500 (-10/10, -10 total)
Tuesday: 1490 (-10/10, -20 total)
Wednesday: 1475 (-15/10, -35 total)
and so on. It doesn't have to be in that precise format, but it's important to keep track of your total open tabs to ensure you're really making a net reduction, and I think it would be nice to show your accumulating reduction to show the progress you've made as the weeks go on.
Anyway, I'd love to hear from anyone who's interested in participating and get feedback on how this idea could be improved!
It's going really well! I'm keeping track in this comment—started out at 1545 tabs and I've brought it down to 945 over 17 days! I'm actually tracking a bit more detail than I'm letting on; the tabs are spread across three browsers (one mobile + two desktop) and I have a hidden constraint of making sure that the tab count in each browser continuously decreases so I don't do any funny business with shifting a bunch of tabs from one browser to another without closing them.
I think what's been really helpful has been setting a reasonable, measurable goal (-10 tabs/day) so that I can adhere to it without too much trouble while still seeing meaningful progress. Some days I'll easily hit the target without thinking about it, other days my bedtime will be creeping up and I go, "Oh shit, gotta kill some tabs real quick!" I try to do a mix of going for the low-hanging fruit as well as tackling the more "difficult" tabs (long-form writing, posts I want to comment on, things related to ongoing projects). It's inevitably going to become more difficult the fewer tabs that remain, but I want to avoid backloading that difficulty because if I leave too many difficult things for last I might start missing my daily target and give up in frustration. I don't think I'll be able to truly get to zero, but the goal would be that (aside from a few permanent tabs like email and Matrix) any remaining tabs would be related to ongoing projects, and that they would all be in per-project tab groups that can be closed and then only opened back up when I'm actively working on that project. Currently, I have all tabs related to all projects always opened and only very loosely organized, which is totally unnecessary. My ideal approach would then be to put any tabs outside of those two categories in a "needs adressing" tab group that I am very strict about not allowing to balloon and endeavor to cut to zero by the end of each day. It's a lot easier to trim than to trailblaze!
Even if I don't close a tab on any given day, it's helpful to move them into tab groups so they're more organized. That way,, if I'm in the mood for some long-form reading or technical writeups I can jump to their respective tab groups instead of having to comb through hundreds of tabs.
As I've progressed, I've also begun to shift my mentality from dreading those "difficult" tabs to instead looking forward to them, since—like anything in life—going through them tends to be a much more fulfilling process than the "easy" tabs that have tended to dominate my attention. It's been great to spend more time reading thoughtful articles and essays and becoming more informed about various topics and perspectives. Definitely a lot better for my mental and cognitive health than doomscrolling and watching dime-a-dozen YouTube videos.