by Serguey Shinder
At a certain point I looked up and my browser had forty open tabs. Each one had been opened for a reason. An article I meant to read, a page I meant to reference, a thing I meant to get back to, a decision I was deferring by keeping the evidence visible. I told myself this was organization. It felt like having everything I needed within reach. It was, in truth, a monument to everything I had not finished deciding.
The tabs were not a plan. They were the absence of one, made visible and given the appearance of order. Every tab was an open loop, a small unresolved thing I had refused to either do or drop, and by keeping it in front of me I had convinced myself I was on top of it. But I was not on top of forty things. I was underneath them, and the weight was real even though I had stopped feeling it as weight and started feeling it as normal.
What I had done, without meaning to, was outsource my sense of what mattered to a row of tabs that grew every day and shrank almost never. The oldest ones had been open for weeks. I was never going to read that article. I knew it, somewhere, and yet closing the tab felt like a small admission of defeat, so it stayed, costing me a sliver of attention every time my eye passed over it, which was hundreds of times a day.
The morning I finally closed them, deliberately, one after another, was uncomfortable in a way I did not expect. Each close was a tiny decision I had been avoiding, and making forty of them in a row felt like clearing out a drawer full of things I had been meaning to deal with. But when the last one was gone and there was a single tab, the actual thing I was supposed to be doing, the relief was physical. The noise had a source, and I had been living inside it.
I understood then that the tabs had never been the problem. They were a symptom of a habit, the habit of keeping things open rather than closing them, of deferring by keeping evidence in view, of mistaking the visibility of a task for progress on it. The clutter on my screen was a faithful map of the clutter in my attention.
Now I treat an open loop as a cost, not a convenience. A thing kept in view is not a thing handled. It is a thing pending, and pending is not free. Either I do it, or I decide not to and let it go, but I no longer let it sit in front of me pretending to be a plan. The most focused I have ever felt began with the deeply unglamorous act of closing tabs I had been too undecided to close.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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